Pepper

Pepper is the machine most people picture when they hear the words "service robot", and its design decisions explain why. It does not walk: the whole lower body is a three-wheeled omnidirectional base that moves in any direction at up to 2 km/h and climbs steps of no more than 1.5 cm. Everything saved on legs went into the parts that meet people — a 1.21 m frame that reaches an adult's chest, arms with articulated hands, a 10.1-inch touchscreen worn on the chest, and a 795 Wh battery (30.0 Ah) large enough to keep the robot working through a shop's or a care home's whole day. The joint count is modest and deliberately so. Twenty motors drive two head joints, two shoulder and two elbow joints per arm, one wrist and one hand joint per side, two hip joints, one knee joint and the three wheels. There is no grasping strength worth quoting; the hands exist to gesture. The sensor set, by contrast, is generous for a robot of this price class: four microphones, two 2D cameras, a 3D sensor and a stereo camera in the head, three head touch sensors, touch sensors in both hands, gyroscopes in the chest and legs, and — in the base — two sonars, six laser sensors, three bumpers and two infrared sensors. Read together, that is a machine built to notice a person approaching and not to run anyone over. The software is the part that has aged, and been re-aged. Pepper runs NAOqi OS and takes installable applications the way a phone takes apps, which is how SoftBank built an ecosystem around it; the current product page adds generative AI and face recognition to the feature list. The family has since split by customer: Pepper+ for retail and for nursing care sold to businesses, Pepper for Education for schools, and Pepper for Home 2.0 for households. Outside Japan the robot is handled regionally — in the United States through RobotLab — and its name and likeness are governed by published brand guidelines, which is unusual enough to be worth noting: "Pepper" is a trademark of SoftBank Robotics, promotional use of the character requires written approval, and negative or overtly commercial depictions are prohibited.

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