Kawasaki RHP Friends

RHP Friends is what happens when Kawasaki takes its industrial humanoid and asks it to be approachable. It belongs to the same Robust Humanoid Platform programme that produced Kaleido — running since 2015, latterly with Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology — but branches off it: roughly 160 cm tall and around 55 kg, against the 180 cm and 80 kg of the Kaleido of the same period, according to figures Kawasaki gives in its own developer interview. The weight is not cosmetic. A slimmer humanoid has less room for actuators, so Kawasaki fitted compact high-performance motors to keep the mass down and the body narrow enough to work in tight spaces and passageways — the kind of gap between a bed and a wall that a factory-sized humanoid cannot enter. The styling follows the same logic in the opposite direction: soft curved lines instead of exposed structure, and a face that is a display, with animated eyes used to signal what the robot is doing. Collaborative-robot thinking is written into the mechanics as well, down to not trapping a hand that comes close. The second half of the machine is conversation. With the Nagai Laboratory at Osaka University, Kawasaki built interaction in which the robot generates a spoken answer and performs a gesture synchronised with it, rather than speaking and moving as two separate systems. That is the part aimed at care work: pushing a wheelchair, keeping an older person company, being present in a room rather than performing a task in a cell. Friends is a research and development platform, not a product. It was shown publicly in 2021 at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo, appeared at iREX 2022 alongside the seventh-generation Kaleido, and remains a demonstration line — Kawasaki publishes no data sheet, price or availability for it, and the industrial roadmap the company gives (factories around 2030, unstructured environments around 2040) belongs to the Kaleido side of the family. The catalogue keeps a separate profile for Kaleido 9, the ninth-generation industrial humanoid shown in December 2025.

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