Japan's first humanoid you can simply buy is 129 cm tall - because that is what fits through the door

On 5 August 2026 ZEALS, a Tokyo conversational-AI company founded in 2014, opened sales of D1 through its robotics division Omakase Robotics. The price starts at 5 million yen per unit, roughly 32,000 dollars, and deployment consultations began the same day. It is the first humanoid in Japan to go on open commercial sale after being trialled in a hospital. The striking number is not the price but the height: about 129.3 cm, on a driving base roughly 48 cm wide. That is a deliberate ceiling rather than a limitation of the engineering. A machine of this size passes through Japanese doorways, shares a lift with the people already in it and turns in the corridors of hospitals, hotels and offices - the places where a 170 cm humanoid becomes an obstacle. D1 rides on wheels rather than legs, carries two arms for moving objects and assisting with tasks, and runs up to about eight hours on a charge, which ZEALS lines up against a standard shift. What the company is really selling is the software layer it has spent a decade building in chat commerce: AI conversation, reception and guidance, indoor navigation and multilingual support. The credential behind the launch is a proof-of-concept at the University of Tsukuba Hospital, Japan's first humanoid trial inside an active medical setting, which ZEALS reports as ending with zero contacts with people and zero falls. The targets are modest and therefore credible: 100 units built in fiscal 2026 and 10,000 cumulative operating hours across healthcare, care homes, manufacturing, logistics and hotels. ZEALS describes the robot as quasi-domestic rather than fully Japanese - components bought on the world market, with the AI, control, assembly and site deployment led at home. The supplier of the driving platform is not published, and industry reporting points to Chinese-built hardware. That detail carries weight this month: on 28 July the US Federal Communications Commission stopped granting authorisations to new foreign robot models, so a machine of this class launched a week later has an open path in Japan and a closed one in the United States.