Pepper, robot, cool japan, tropenmuseum

Robots

Meet Pepper, our human robot.

Japan is fascinated by robots and the world is fascinated by Japanese robots. No other country in the world is more closely associated with humanoid machines than Japan. Often, these associations are based both on fact and on fantasy. Japan certainly does produce a lot of robots,both in factories and laboratories, and in comic books, films and games.

While scientists and engineers all over the world work on the latest generation of robotics, the Japanese approach remains unique. There, robots are seen not as inanimate mechanical aids, but as creatures with a soul. This goes partly back to Shintoism, which assumes that all natural phenomena and some objects have souls.