Wakamaru

Wakamaru is a Japanese robot made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries that is intended to perform natural communication with human beings.

On February 2, 2003, the Wakamaru was announced to media outlets in Japan and was displayed at the Robodex 2003 robot exhibition later in April.

In 2005, Mitsubishi reported that they exclusively did a test sale of 100 units of Wakamaru robots to "ordinary households" in twenty three Tokyo neighborhoods.

He wanted to create "a humanoid robot that can approach its user" so that the Wakamaru could be seen as an independent personality rather than a machine.

[7] The yellow robot is three feet tall, consisting of a bottom base with a wheel and three body components on top.

The circular head has round eyes which work as sensors and a wide mouth which makes the robot look toy-like.

The Wakamaru product comes with the robot main unit, a charging station, a broadband router, touch panel, and computer.

[11] Astrid M. Rosenthal-von der Pütten of University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany conducted research on how characteristics of robots determine responses from humans through an online web poll.

The Wakamaru was used in this research project in a cluster of robots to determine four factors: threatening, likability, submissiveness, and unfamiliarity.

From the web online poll, the results concluded that Wakamaru and other robots such as the Dynamoid, Icat, Asoy, Riman, and Snackbot were non-threatening, submissive, not human and mechanical but also unfamiliar and less likable.