Kachaka

Kachaka is the first product of Preferred Robotics, a Tokyo company founded in November 2021 by the deep-learning lab Preferred Networks, and the household original from which the whole Kachaka line descends. It went on sale in Japan on 17 May 2023, after a pre-order phase opened on 1 February that year and a round of monitor testing in real homes. The manufacturer does not call it a robot but a smart furniture platform, and the wording is honest about the design: the machine itself does almost nothing on its own. It is a 115 mm-tall wheeled slab that drives under a matching Kachaka Shelf, docks with it and hauls it to a named room. Books, medicines, toys or laundry travel because the shelf holding them travels. Furniture designer Gen Suzuki and the design firm Takram shaped it to sit unremarked in a living room, which is the point — nothing about it reads as machinery. Control is by voice or app. Four microphones and a speech model tuned with Optuna, Preferred Networks' own hyperparameter optimisation framework, let it pick commands out of household noise; a voice shortcut feature added before launch collapses long instructions like »hey Kachaka, bring the kitchen shelf to the dining room« into a couple of words. A timer can move a shelf at the same hour every day, which the manufacturer promotes as a way of building habits, from taking medicine to children learning to tidy up. Navigation uses an in-house graph-based SLAM system fusing camera, LiDAR and wheel data, plus a deep-learning obstacle module that segments the floor pixel by pixel — an unusually heavy stack for a domestic appliance, and the reason the robot copes with a room whose contents move daily. The monitor tests led to a doubling of top speed and roughly halved the time to complete an order. The commercial structure matters as much as the hardware. The robot costs 228,000 yen outright or 4,980 yen a month over 48 instalments, shelves are extra (29,800 yen for three tiers, 23,800 for two), and using the robot at all requires a Kachaka Subscription at 980 yen a month. A household that stops paying keeps the furniture, not the function.

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