Hubot

Hubotics Inc. was a small Carlsbad, California startup formed to build a personal home robot named Hubot. Mechanical/graphic designer Glen Keith hand-built early prototypes in his home, carving the rotating sensor head from plastic and fiberglass.

Hubot stood roughly 1.10 m tall and moved on wheels. It contained a proprietary CP/M-class computer (one source names SysCon), a monochrome monitor, a detachable keyboard, printer support, joystick control, a 12-inch display, a TV tuner, a cassette deck and an Atari 2600.

A Polaroid-style ultrasonic transducer mounted on a rotating collar scanned the room for obstacles before movement. An optional voice-command module with a built-in microphone allowed limited spoken control; the voice synthesizer could speak about 1,200 words in English.

The robot was demonstrated at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was priced at US$3,495 (well over US$10,000 in 2026 dollars). Planned optional modules included a fire/burglar alarm, a robotic arm, a drink tray, a vacuum unit, route programming, and autonomous recharging.

The project was too expensive and too far ahead of its ecosystem to succeed at scale. Production estimates vary; one Reddit post claims roughly 75 units were made, but this is a single-source figure and should be treated cautiously.

Hubot’s body was rotomolded in polyethylene — the same material used for trash cans and water tanks — because it was cheap, rugged and still looked good after scratches. Its head used the same sonar sensor found in Polaroid cameras. Today a Hubot is preserved in the Computer History Museum’s collection.

Hubot is an early, exuberant example of the 1980s personal-robot boom. It anticipated later voice-activated smart-home assistants by several decades, even if it failed commercially.