Pepper

Pepper is the 120 cm wheeled-base "social robot" introduced by SoftBank Robotics in June 2014. It was the first robot mass-produced with explicit emotion recognition: a chest-mounted tablet for visitor interaction, 20 DoF, microphone array, and cameras for face / mood detection. SoftBank halted production in 2021 after Pepper failed to find a sustainable commercial use case beyond hospitality and retail kiosks (en.wikipedia.org)).

Despite being out of production, tens of thousands of Pepper units remain deployed worldwide — banks, hotels, museums, hospitals and education programmes. Its lifetime gives a historical baseline for what a "social humanoid" looked like before the 2024-2026 LLM wave reshaped the category.