WABOT-1 — The Humanoid Robot Waseda Completed in 1973

WABOT-1 was a humanoid robot completed at Waseda University in Tokyo in 1973. It walked on two legs, gripped and carried objects with hands fitted with tactile sensors, measured the distance and direction of objects with artificial eyes and ears, and spoke with people in Japanese through an artificial mouth. Waseda describes it as the world's first full-scale humanoid robot, and it marks the starting point of the research into humanoid robots in which Japan, with Honda's ASIMO among others, would later lead.

A project of four laboratories

WABOT stands for "WAseda roBOT". According to material from the university's Humanoid Robotics Institute, four laboratories in the School of Science and Engineering formed a bio-engineering group and began the WABOT project in 1970. At its centre was Professor Ichiro Kato, whom Waseda calls the father of Japanese robotics research; Kato's laboratory was responsible for the artificial limbs and their control.

The joint effort also included Professor Katsuhiko Shirai, a specialist in speech recognition and speech synthesis who later became president of the university. A Waseda article recounts that Shirai and Kato hit it off, and that four faculty members then developed WABOT-1 together. With legs and hands, eyes and ears, and a mouth each handled by a different specialist, the project showed from the start that a humanoid is not only a piece of mechanical engineering but an assembly of research into the senses and language.

What it could do

The Humanoid Robotics Institute's material summarises WABOT-1's abilities as follows.

Its researchers estimated its intelligence as equivalent to that of a child of one and a half. By today's standards its abilities were very limited, but the project's significance lies in combining walking, grasping, vision and conversation in a single machine in human form. Where SRI's Shakey, begun in 1966, had shown a wheeled, box-shaped mobile robot that could look, plan and move, WABOT-1 tried to reproduce the shape of the human body itself.

How to read "first"

Waseda's English article says WABOT-1 is widely considered the world's first full-scale humanoid robot, and the Humanoid Robotics Institute's material likewise calls it the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot developed in the world. Both are the developing university's own descriptions, and both carry the qualifier "full-scale". WABOT-1 is best understood as one of the earliest machines to put walking legs, grasping hands and a speaking mouth into one body.

WABOT-2 and what followed at Waseda

Kato's project continued with WABOT-2 in 1984. According to Waseda, WABOT-2 was designed for musical ability: it could read sheet music, play an electronic organ with both hands and feet, and adjust its performance to accompany a human singer. It was shown at Expo '85, the 1985 international exposition in Tsukuba, where it demonstrated to a wide audience that robots could perform creative and interactive tasks.

In the 1990s and 2000s researchers at Waseda, including Professor Atsuo Takanishi, went on with the WABIAN series, studying smoother and more human-like walking on two legs. Stable walking, turning and walking while carrying objects were the themes, and the university says the series helped improve balance control and whole-body coordination in humanoid robots.

WABOT-1 seen from today

Humanoid research later moved from university laboratories into corporate product development. Honda began its research into walking on two legs in 1986 and unveiled ASIMO in 2000. In the 2010s the hydraulic Atlas was built for a competition run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and in the 2020s Tesla's Optimus and Figure have raised enormous sums on the promise of factory labour.

Yet the combination WABOT-1 set out in the 1970s, walking, grasping, seeing and talking, remains the skeleton of what humanoid developers aim for. What has changed is that each ability is now meant to be learned from large amounts of data rather than programmed by hand.

WABOT-1 is on display in the lobby of Building 63 on the Nishi-Waseda campus in Tokyo. WABOT-2 usually stands next to it but, according to Waseda, as of May 2026 it was on loan to a museum in Melbourne, Australia. The wider story is in the humanoid and AI robots timeline.