conversation
Multilingual reception and engagement dialogue
Commercially deployedVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- Application scripting
Research record R-006Commercially available
ARI
By PAL Robotics · Spain · announced September 2019
Barcelona's wheeled social humanoid, a fixture of European research labs and reception desks.
Broader research scope
This is a research record, not a curated recommendation.
The main field guide selects 14 companion robots for deeper review. This entry belongs to a separate 53-record index that also covers industrial, research, and developer systems.
Research summary
What the record says.
ARI is PAL Robotics' social humanoid: a 165 centimeter wheeled robot with expressive eyes, gesture arms and a touchscreen on its chest, built for receptions, healthcare settings and research. PAL, a Barcelona company building humanoids since 2004, sells ARI alongside its TIAGo research robots and heavier platforms.
ARI is quote-priced and genuinely available, with years of shipments to European research institutions and EU-funded human-robot-interaction projects. An updated datasheet in February 2025 confirmed the current configuration: onboard NVIDIA GPU, face and skeleton tracking, multilingual speech and full ROS support.
ARI represents the pragmatic European approach to social robots: wheels, a screen, open software and no promises of chores.
Delivery evidence
Announcement is not arrival.
Commercially deployed
Years of deliveries to research institutions and EU projects
Capability ledger
What has actually been shown?
3 material claims are separated by evidence setting and human involvement. The strongest recorded signal is Commercially deployed; it does not automatically transfer to every row.
remote presence
Telepresence and remote-operator modes
Real-world demoVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Teleoperated
- Human intervention
- Operator driven when used this way
education
Research and teaching platform
Commercially deployedVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- Researcher programmed
Hardware record.
- Height
- 165 cm
- Weight
- 60 kg
- Locomotion
- Differential-drive wheeled base
- Payload
- Gesture arms; light object handling
- Runtime
- About 8 hours (claimed)
- Charging
- Dock or plug-in
- Top speed
- 1.5 m/s
- Degrees of freedom
- Arms 4 DoF each plus head and base
- Hands
- Simple hands for gesture
- Face / expression
- LED eyes with expressions; chest touchscreen
- Sensors
- RGB-D head camera, chest camera, microphone array, laser rangefinder
Software record.
- AI platform
- ROS-based PAL software stack; NVIDIA GPU onboard; LLM integrations configurable
- Voice
- Multilingual speech recognition and synthesis
- Languages
- 30+ configurable
- Visual recognition
- Face and skeleton tracking, gaze estimation
- Memory
- Application dependent
- Processing
- Onboard GPU; cloud optional
- Autonomous abilities
- Autonomous navigation, greeting and dialogue within applications
- Teleoperation
- Full programmatic and operator control available
- Software updates
- Vendor supported
- Developer access
- Excellent: ROS-native, documented APIs
Who can see, hear, or take control?
- Recording storage
- Customer controlled; on-premises processing possible
- Remote operation possible
- Yes
- Teleoperation disclosure
- Deployment dependent
- Camera / microphone controls
- Programmatic control
- Data deletion
- Customer responsibility
- Account required
- No
- Emergency stop
- Hardware e-stop
- Children and pets
- Low-speed wheeled design for public spaces
- Security updates
- Vendor supported
Lifecycle record
Status history.
- Public demonstration
ARI introduced
- Commercially available
Shipments to research customers
- Commercially available
Updated datasheet; continued sales
Source register
2 linked sources.
These sources support the research record as a whole. Unlike the curated dossiers, this imported record does not yet map every claim to a stable source ID.