F.R.H.A.N.K. - Classified

We have co-created F.R.H.A.N.K, an artificially intelligent, socially curated gaming  humanoid robot that acts as a side-kick to celebrity youtube gamer vlogger Ali-A. The Fridge Raider Hunger Automated Nutritional Kit, or F.R.H.A.N.K. for short, was Ali-A's side-kick for 7 months between October 2014 and April 2015. During this period he was hanging out, playing Call of Duty, learning how to speak ‘Gamer’ and serving Fridge Raiders. Several videos produced incorporating the Ali-A and FRHANK, accumulated over 15m views through Ali-A's youtube channel and micro-site frhank.com. The community of Ali-A's fans were continuously engaged in contributing to FRHANK's evolution.

The robot is the theme of an advertisement campaign by Saatchi+Saatchi for Mattessons Fridge Raiders and collaboration with us (RoboSavvy), WEIR+WONG and Hirsch&Mann that led to create the world’s first socially curated, artificially intelligent gaming robot.


The campaign started as a mysterious crate that showed up at Ali-A's garden. During a week of daily clues posed through frhank.com site, fans raced to decipher and lead ultimately to helping Ali-A open the crate in which he finds the robot.

FRHANK was involved in several entertaining videos with Ali-A including fighting real life zombies in a dungeon and chatting up girls in a shopping mall.



F.R.H.A.N.K. has also hit the mainstream media channels with a TV campaign and on-pack promotions.







F.R.H.A.N.K's features include:

• > He has a speech recognition unit, which allows him to respond to key phrases and questions. Originally, and very deliberately, his ‘gaming vernacular’ wasn’t particularly relevant to kids that game. To improve this, his community and fans submitted new responses through the frhank.com​ website. This new, socially curated vocabulary, is downloaded to his brain on a daily basis.
  
  
• > His power unit stores a range of Fridge Raiders and F.R.H.A.N.K. offers you this during conversation if he thinks you are in need of a ‘power-up’.
  
  
• > He detects the gameplay on Call of Duty by sniffing the signal sent from your gaming controller. He then verbally interacts with the gamer as they progress through the levels.
  
  
• > He is a self balancing robot and uses an IMU similar to that of a Segway, in order to stay upright and walk smoothly on any terrain.
  
  
• > He has an OpenGL animation system that allows him to convey emotion in real time, during conversations. Users on frhank.com​ have been submitting new expressions for him to learn.
  
  
• > He has some 16 motors and several computers that help to move and animate him and a dictionary of gestures that allow him to express himself using his arms and head movement.
  
  
• > His fans on frhank.com ​submitted designs for his new arm. The winning design featured a humanoid hand and a projector that allows him to beam Playstation games onto any surface in front of him.
  
  
• > F.R.H.A.N.K. has an LED canvas in his chest - which will be used to feature community submitted illustrations and animations.

Due to the many queries and curiosity surrounding FRHANK, we decided to expose some of the secrets behind what went into the making of a humanoid robot used in meat snack advertisement campaign in a timeframe that is typically impossible in the robotics world.
We produced a video that tells the story of how we worked to create him and describes FRHANK's main functionality and the production process.