Pepper

Pepper is the world's first mass-produced social humanoid robot, developed jointly by SoftBank Group and France's Aldebaran Robotics and launched in Japan in June 2014. It stands 120 cm tall, weighs 28 kg and has 20 degrees of freedom across its body. It can communicate with people through speech, facial expressions and touch, and its core capability is 'emotion recognition': judging human emotions from facial expressions and voice and responding accordingly.

Pepper is positioned as 'a robot that can keep people company': the Japanese home version was priced from ¥198,000 (about RMB 16,000), and it long appeared in a leading role at SoftBank stores, banks, shopping malls, schools and hospitals as a sales assistant, greeter, receptionist and educational aide. Global deployments once reached tens of thousands of units, making it one of the best-selling humanoid robots. It runs on the NAOqi operating system and offers the Pepper SDK and 'cloud brain' (Cognitive) services for further development.

In June 2021 SoftBank announced that it would stop producing Pepper (maintenance and software support would continue only for existing customers), marking the end of an era. Pepper's commercialization has provided an important reference for the humanoid robot industry that followed, especially social and service robots, and its 'humanoid + emotional interaction' design language has had a lasting influence.