Full Name
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.
About
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., known as MHI and in Chinese as 三菱重工, is a Japanese heavy-industry group established in 1950 out of the Mitsubishi organisation that Yataro Iwasaki founded in 1870, and headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. Its businesses span energy and power systems, logistics and drive systems, aviation and defence, and machinery and infrastructure, and it is consistently ranked among the world's largest companies in the Fortune Global 500. Its contribution to robotics is Wakamaru, which it called the world's first communication robot. The first Wakamaru prototype was developed in 2003 and a commercial model reached the Japanese market in 2005 at a price of around fifteen thousand United States dollars, after the company tested it in real homes in Tokyo and claimed it was highly reliable and safe in a variety of different family environments. Wakamaru stands about one metre tall and weighs thirty kilograms, moves on a two-degree-of-freedom wheeled base at roughly one kilometre per hour, and carries thirteen degrees of freedom in total: three in the head, four in each of its two arms, and the two in its base. It carries two cameras, one omnidirectional on top of its head and one forward-facing on its forehead, together with one ultrasound and three infrared obstacle-detection sensors, a bumper sensor and a microphone, and it runs for about two hours on a lithium-ion battery that it can recharge by itself, operating in both autonomous and teleoperation modes. It was designed to make eye contact while talking, recognise faces, carry on conversations, shake hands and call emergency services if it suspected something was wrong, and it was used as a domestic assistant, an office receptionist, an event host and a sales representative. Commercially it disappointed: sales in Japan and abroad fell well short of the company's expectations, and by 2007 the robot was mainly working as a receptionist in corporate offices, with production ending later in the decade. Despite that, Wakamaru is recognised as a milestone in human-robot interaction and one of the first serious attempts to put an advanced humanoid robot to work in real environments, and the product page the company maintains for it today dates from 2015, when MHI was still documenting the robot as part of its corporate social responsibility record.
Technical Overview
Contact Information
Robot Products
Wakamaru
Released 2005
Development Timeline
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