Waseda WABOT-1

WABOT-1 is a full-scale humanoid built at Waseda University in Tokyo under Professor Ichiro Kato's WABOT (WAseda roBOT) project. Waseda says it was completed in 1973 and is widely considered the world's first full-scale humanoid robot. Wikipedia gives 1972 for the same completion; this page follows Waseda's own 2026 retrospective.

The robot walked on two legs, gripped objects with tactile-sensing hands and could hold a basic conversation in Japanese. Waseda's WABOT booklet names its limb-control, vision and conversation systems, and gives its hands as WAM-4 and its legs as WL-5. The booklet also gives the WAM-4 hand one degree of freedom and says the WL-5 legs were minicomputer-controlled. Waseda's researchers estimated its mental faculty at that of a one-and-a-half-year-old child, which was a comparison rather than a measured result.

WABOT-1 was a research machine. No price or purchase route appears in the sources reviewed. Waseda's May 2026 retrospective says it is on display in the lobby of Building 63 on the Nishi-Waseda campus. The Waseda sources reviewed give no height, weight or speed, so those specification fields are left empty.