In 1973, a team at Waseda University in Tokyo led by Professor Ichiro Kato completed WABOT-1 (WAseda roBOT), which Waseda describes as “the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot developed in the world.” The project had begun in 1970 as part of Kato’s effort to build a machine with a human-like form and human-like functions.
WABOT-1 integrated three subsystems: a limb-control system, a vision system, and a conversation system. According to Waseda’s own account, it “was able to communicate with a person in Japanese and to measure distances and directions to objects using external receptors,” and it “walked with his lower limbs and was able to grip and transport objects with hands that used tactile-sensors.” The hands were the WAM-4 artificial hands and the legs the WL-5 artificial limbs.
The Waseda lab estimated that WABOT-1’s mental and physical capabilities were roughly those of a one-and-a-half-year-old child. The same lab went on to build WABOT-2 (1984), a “specialist robot” that could read a musical score and play an electronic organ. WABOT-1 sits early in the lineage of Japanese humanoid robotics that later produced Honda’s ASIMO and a wave of commercial and research humanoids.