Yaskawa Electric · home humanoid
SmartPal VII
A wheeled service humanoid with a sensor head and two arms that a remote person could drive and steer with a Kinect, for example to tidy a room or keep in touch with family far away. It followed Yaskawa's SmartPal V of 2007.
- Price
- —Not published
- Height
- —Not published
- Weight
- —Not published
- Payload
- —Not published
- Speed
- —Not published
- Battery
- —Not published
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Why it matters
An early demonstration of steering a humanoid's arms remotely with a consumer Kinect motion sensor.
Real-world use
No customers or deployments reported yet.
Maker
Yaskawa ElectricCompany · Kitakyushu, JapanPublic attention
A historic robot: no longer sold or in use, so it is not ranked against current humanoids.
- No Wikipedia article of its own yet
- 2 news stories from reputable press listed on this page
Measures how much people read and write about a robot, not how good it is. Measured 2026-10-13; same method for every robot. How it is measured
What’s inside
The parts the company has talked about publicly.
- Movement
- Wheeled base
- Actuators & motors
- Two arms with improved wrists over the earlier SmartPal V, a bending waist and a wheeled trolley base; the predecessor SmartPal V had 21 DoF (7 per arm, 1 per hand, 2 waist, 3 base).
- Hands
- Simple grippers; demonstrated picking up a stuffed toy and placing it in a box.
- Sensors & vision
- Pan-tilt stereo camera and an infrared sensor in the head, gyro sensor in the body, touch sensors.
- AI & software
- A remote operator's arm motions, captured by a Microsoft Kinect, are mapped by Yaskawa's software onto the robot's hand, waist and trolley motion.
- Other details
- Shown at the 2011 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, framed around a person in Tokyo tidying a parent's home in Fukuoka and keeping in touch remotely. Predecessor SmartPal V (2007) was 132.5 cm, 127 kg with a 23 kg battery and about 2.5 h runtime.
Named suppliers:Microsoft (Kinect)
From the maker
SmartPal VII is the only humanoid from Yaskawa Electric in the atlas.
Watch SmartPal VII
Made, sold and where
Unit counts are usually company figures; analysts often disagree.
- Price
- Not published
- How to get one
- No official buying page found
- Built
- Prototype
- Sold or delivered
- not sold
- Where it is sold or used
- Japan (Yaskawa Electric)
News
The latest 2, newest first. Summaries are ours; tap through for the original.
- Kinect-driven SmartPal VII tidies up at iREX
Gizmodo Japan watched the robot copy an operator's arm movements to put a toy in a box at the 2011 robot exhibition.
Gizmodo Japan - Yaskawa humanoid controlled through Kinect
TechCrunch described SmartPal VII as a telepresence and household-help robot steered by a remote person via Kinect.
TechCrunch
Side by side with its peers
Picked by the same rules for every humanoid: another maker’s robot that moves the same way, is at the same stage and does at least one of the same main jobs, first shown within two years. Closer size and price rank higher. How we choose
| Measure | No public photo yetWe only show photos we're allowed to useSmartPal VIIYaskawa Electric |  CoseroUniversity of Bonn (Autonomous Intelligent Systems group, team NimbRo@Home)Same jobs: home, care · Both on wheels · Both past robots |  PR2Willow GarageSame job: home · Both on wheels · Both past robots |  Robovie-R Ver.3Vstone and ATRSame job: care · Both on wheels · Both past robots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First shown | 2011-11 | 2010-09 | 2010-05-26 | 2010-04-16 |
| Status | Retired | Retired | Discontinued | Discontinued |
| Height | — | — | 165 cm | 120 cm |
| Weight | — | — | 226.8 kg | 43 kg |
| Joints | — | 30 | 20 | 17 |
| Speed | — | — | 3.6 km/h | 2.5 km/h |
| Payload | — | — | 1.8 kg | — |
| Battery | — | — | 2 h | — |
| Price | — | — | $400,000 | $41,000 |
Sources
Figures come from public sources. Every link below backs something on this page.
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