Pepper

What it's for

Pepper is a wheeled, partly humanoid service robot 120 cm tall, with a tablet on its chest, for reception and retail customer service, developed by Aldebaran and SoftBank Robotics. It has 20 degrees of freedom (2 in each hand), four microphones, two HD cameras, a 3D depth sensor, touch sensors in the head and hands, two sonars and six lasers, and its brain is the NAOqi OS system.

Two use cases are listed: reception and retail customer service. The robot handled simple voice and visual interactions: welcoming guests, pointing the way, asking questions and collecting answers on the screen. Today it is more of a historical curiosity than a real option: production was halted in 2021 and sales were wound down in 2024.

If you want a current reception robot, browse the category “Service robots” and the article “Service Robots in Restaurants and Hotels”. We describe typical deployments in hotels and retail.

Who it's for

Best suited to: collectors, technology museums and human-robot interaction researchers who want a piece of the first generation of service robots, plus institutions that already own a Pepper and are maintaining an existing deployment.

A poor fit: practically any company looking for a reception robot to deploy in 2026. The product is discontinued, it has no official availability in Poland, and its hardware and software architecture is more than a decade old. A new purchase would mean the risk of missing parts, updates and support. Consider temi V3 for reception instead or, if you need a robot that serves, a model from the service category such as Bear Robotics Servi.

Deployments

The model was never officially sold on the Polish market, and we know of no documented Polish user. Our catalog lists no named customer deployments of Pepper.

Around 27,000 units were built worldwide, mainly for retail, reception and customer service. In Polish practice, similar functions are now filled by the service robots described in the category “Service robots” and by food-service models such as Bear Robotics Servi.

temi V3 is a compact personal and reception robot: simpler than Pepper and armless, but still on the market and with updated software. Choose it when you need a screen on wheels that follows a person and handles video calls.

For transport and serving in restaurants and hotels, Bear Robotics Servi and LG CLOi ServeBot make more sense, since they do what Pepper never did: they actually carry trays. Mirokaï is a newer service robot with a distinctive "personality"; we have not confirmed its availability in Poland. If you are curious about the younger sibling from the same family, see NAO, a smaller educational humanoid. For historical reference points, also look at EMIEW 2 and Wakamaru.

Pepper was unveiled in January 2012 (according to our catalog), and sales began in 2014-2015; sources give different dates, so treat them with caution. The robot came from Aldebaran, a company previously known for NAO, and was developed under the SoftBank Robotics brand.

The rest of the story is short: production was halted in 2021 and sales were wound down completely in 2024, after roughly 27,000 units had been built. In 2025 Aldebaran declared insolvency, and its assets were taken over by Maxvision, now operating under the Maxtronics brand.