SoftBank Pepper

Origins and history

Pepper was designed by French robotics company Aldebaran Robotics, acquired by Japan's SoftBank Group in 2012. The robot made its public debut in Tokyo on 5 June 2014, unveiled by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. Consumer sales launched in Japan in June 2015 — the first batch of 1,000 units sold out in 60 seconds. Pepper reached European markets in 2016. In June 2021, after approximately 27,000 units had been manufactured, SoftBank halted production due to weak demand and difficulties monetising the platform in commercial environments. In 2025, Aldebaran Robotics entered receivership.

Design and degrees of freedom

Pepper is a semi-humanoid robot — it has a head, torso and two arms, but uses a three-wheeled holonomic mobile base instead of legs. It has 20 degrees of freedom in total: 2 in the head (pan ±119.5°, tilt -40.5°/+36.5°), 3 per arm (shoulder, elbow, wrist), 1 per hand (5 synchronised fingers), 2 at the hip (pitch and roll), 1 at the knee (torso tilt -5.5°/+124.5°), and 3 in the wheeled base. The robot stands 120.6 cm tall, is 480 mm wide and 425 mm deep, and weighs 28 kg.

Sensors and perception

The head carries two HD RGB cameras (mouth: 640×480 @ 30fps; forehead: 1280×960 @ 30fps), a 3D depth sensor behind the eyes (similar to Asus Xtion; range 0.3–3.5 m), a 4-microphone MEMS array, and 3 capacitive touch sensors. The torso houses a gyroscope/IMU. The mobile base features 6 laser rangefinders (range up to 3 m), 2 ultrasonic sonars (range 0.25–2.5 m), 3 bumper sensors and an additional gyroscope. A 10.1-inch Android touchscreen tablet (1280×800) is embedded in the chest. LED arrays in the eyes, ears, chest, shoulders and feet enable expressive visual feedback.

Computing platform and software

Pepper's brain is an Intel Atom E3845 quad-core processor at 1.91 GHz with fanless passive cooling, mounted in the head. An equivalent compute module controls the mobile base. The operating system is NAOqi OS (versions 2.5 and 2.9) — a specialised Linux distribution developed by Aldebaran. Development tools include the Choregraphe visual behavior editor, Python SDK, C++ SDK, and QiSDK (Android SDK for the built-in tablet). Unofficial ROS community support exists via pepper_robot packages for ROS Melodic/Noetic. The lithium-ion battery (30.0 Ah / 795 Wh) provides approximately 12 hours of operation in shop mode.

Applications and deployments

Pepper was deployed as an office and hotel receptionist, retail and banking assistant, airport guide (e.g. Montréal-Trudeau International Airport) and restaurant entertainer. It became one of the most widely used academic platforms for human-robot interaction (HRI) research, including the EU/Japan-funded CARESSES project on culturally competent robotic elderly care, and hundreds of scientific publications worldwide.