Softbank Holds Back the Production of Pepper Robot

Farewell to Pepper, the world's first social and friendly humanoid robot.

Pepper is the world's first semi-humanoid robot, which is manufactured by SoftBank Robotics. This robot has been designed with the ability to recognize faces and read basic human emotions. Pepper also has the ability to interact with people through conversation and his touch screen. Recently Pepper is being used as a receptionist at several offices and is able to recognize the visitors with the help of a face recognition sensor. The robot has also been used at banks and medical facilities in Japan.

Pepper is a friendly and social humanoid robot that was designed to be a companion in the home and help customers at retail stores. It talks, waves, and makes everyone smile. It can dance, it can speak, and also do certain tricks. Pepper is not a functional robot for domestic use. Rather, Pepper was created with the intention to make people enjoy life, improve people's lives, simplify relationships, have fun with people and connect people with the outside world.

The robot's head has four microphones, two HD cameras (in the mouth and forehead), and a 3-D depth sensor (behind the eyes). There is a gyroscope in the torso and touch sensors in the head and hands. The mobile base has two sonars, six lasers, three bumper sensors, and a gyroscope.

Pepper is available today for businesses and schools. Over 2,000 companies around the world have adopted Pepper as an assistant to welcome, inform and direct visitors in an innovative way.

However, the production of this semi-humanoid robot has been suspended by SoftBank. The corporation decided to pause the production at least for now until there is a need for more.

Back in 2014, Softbank began manufacturing Pepper (the humanoid robot) but it could only make 27,000 models. Also, the price for the robot was considered too high for the educational and research facilities. Though Pepper seemed to be independent it was often controlled remotely.  Pepper has largely failed to meet its promise since its introduction to the world which was 7 years ago. But in some way or the other, Pepper has inspired the future generation of robot engineers.

The price of the robot was $1,600 for the consumers in Japan and for the universities and businesses, it was over $20,000. This appeared to be a bit expensive for the small businesses. Its sales suffered a huge loss from the limited functionality of the robot and unreliability. The use of that robot is quite limited because other than recognizing people and looking impressive, what can it actually do? " Further, the robot wasn't incorporated with more features by the Softbank because of its clashes between its French Robotic Project and its Tokyo management. This extremely affected the development of Pepper, the humanoid robot.

Pepper was not given much priority as the Softbank shifted its focus to the robot Whiz. In 2018, SoftBank announced a more practical robot called Whiz, which cleans floors for businesses. Even though Pepper can move on wheels, but it typically stays in place and therefore lacks the superiority of Whiz's movement.

Pepper was introduced as an attempt to bring some of the technologies that are underlying to a broader commercial audience. Pepper was made pint-size and it was created and designed to greet people.

However, Softbank has temporarily suspended the production of Pepper but they are ready to resume anytime depending on inventory situations.