
SanTO
SanTO’s design combines robotics with religious symbols and sacred art, and also involves elements of neoclassical architecture and the golden ratio. This is innovative in terms of robotics but at the same time, it is visually conservative as it mirrors elements from the past.
San To
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1. Name: SanTO (a.k.a. Sanctified Theomorphic Operator)
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2. Manufacturer: N/A (Prototype)
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3. Robot Description: A 2 degrees of freedom robot with the appearance of a statue of a Catholic saint inside a niche.
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4. Specifications:
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4.1 Size and weight:
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4.2 Hardware: Its hardware is mainly composed by a RaspberryPI, capacitive sensors, LEDs, speaker, camera, microphone and motors.
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5. Design Features: SanTO’s design combines robotics with religious symbols and sacred art, and also involves elements of neoclassical architecture and the golden ratio. This is innovative in terms of robotics but at the same time, it is visually conservative as it mirrors elements from the past.
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5.1Available language: English, Polish, Russian
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6. Functions and Applications: The SanTO robot has different use cases: It can keep company during prayer, teach catechisms or catechesis, tell the story of the lives of saints, report the Pope’s homilies, cite verses from the Bible or propose a prayer. The robot is designed especially for elderly worshipers. The perception of its sacredness by Catholic believers was measured in a session of experiments performed in a church in Lima, Peru.
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7.References:
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[1] Trovato G, Lucho C, Ramón A, Ramirez R, Rodriguez L, Cuellar F. The creation of SanTO: a robot with “divine” features. 2018 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR), 2018, p. 437–42. https://doi.org/10.1109/URAI.2018.8442207.
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[2] Trovato G, Lucho C, Ramón A, Ramirez R, Rodriguez L, Cuellar F. The creation of SanTO: a robot with “divine” features. 2018 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR), 2018, p. 437–42. https://doi.org/10.1109/URAI.2018.8442207.
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[3] Trovato G, Pariasca F, Ramirez R, Cerna J, Reutskiy V, Rodriguez L, et al. Communicating with SanTO – the first Catholic robot. 2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2019, p. 1–6.