Steve

Steve is a one-off character robot designed by Belgian robot maker Jan De Coster, formerly working as Sulu.be. Conceived in 2013 as a stage host for events, Steve was meant to be slightly bigger than the average person; the designer describes him as a friendly giant around two metres tall.

He interviewed guests and welcomed audiences at events and, from 2015, acted as an employee of Brightfish fronting cinema advertising campaigns in Belgium. The robot was built as a single piece for these engagements and was never a series product, so there is no price list and any similar build would be quoted individually.

Weight, degrees of freedom, actuators and control electronics are not published by the designer, which leaves most of the technical sheet empty. Steve illustrates the entertainment branch of humanoid design, where expression and audience contact matter more than payload or speed.

In that sense he is closer to the series-built entertainment humanoid Engineered Arts Ameca than to any factory robot, with the difference that Steve exists only once and was shaped for specific campaigns rather than for a catalogue.