Emotional Robot Pepper Sells Out After 1,000 Units Bought in One Minute

In just 60 seconds of its starting sale, Pepper, dubbed the "emotional robot" for its ability to read facial expressions and "feel" was sold out during its first day of consumer sales in Japan, according to SoftBank Robotics Corp., its creator.

Only 1,000 units was available for sale during its consumer launch with each unit set at a base price of ¥198,000 ($1,600) including an additional charge of ¥24,600 ($200) for the monthly data and insurance fees. 

While robots are traditionally taken as inanimate objects without emotions, Pepper tries to break the notion by being the first robot to feature "emotions." With a height almost 4 feet tall and a weight measuring only 61 pounds, Pepper was mechanically and electronically designed to read people's emotions. I also has the ability to distinguish between tones of voice and different facial expressions, which in turn gives it the ability to correlate when interacting with a human. Most importantly, however, "he tries to make you happy," according to Softbank's project manager, Kaname Hayashi as he told it to CNN just last year.

Featuring a state-of-the-art technological design, Pepper's own array of cameras, accelerometers, touch sensors, as well as other type of sensors found in his "endocrine-type multi-layer neural network," helps him read human emotions and even develop his own. Unlike what the name robot originally connotes, Pepper is meant as a companion capable of emotions and not as a robot slaving to work.

However advanced Pepper's programming may be, its developers are not claiming it to be perfect and is thereby prone to make mistakes. But just like a person, Pepper can learn and grow via his own emotional engine as he adapts and gain collective wisdom from his accumulated cloud information.

To date, Pepper is only capable of four languages namely Spanish, Japanese, French, and English but may soon learn more languages in the coming months as more languages are made available on its app store, which, currently has around 200 applications in its roster.