Kawasaki Kaleido

Kaleido is the humanoid-robot programme run by Kawasaki Heavy Industries — the company that built Japan's first industrial robot. Development started in 2015, drawing on more than half a century of experience designing factory-floor robots, and Kaleido was unveiled publicly at the 2017 International Robot Exhibition (iREX 2017) doing stand-up motions and pull-ups. Eight prototype generations have followed.

Kawasaki took a deliberately different design approach to most humanoid teams: rather than copy human anatomy directly, the team extracted what they describe as the essential functional principles of human movement and recreated them with motors and mechanical structures. The result is a research platform that prioritises stable bipedal walking with payloads heavier than the robot itself, supported by lightweight magnesium-alloy structural parts and 3D-printed resin exterior panels. By 2019 Kaleido had achieved fully untethered bipedal walking from an onboard battery; by 2023 it added real-time footstep adjustment to recover from disturbed balance.

Alongside Kaleido, Kawasaki built a parallel programme called Friends — a slimmer, more approachable humanoid focused on tight indoor spaces, caregiving and daily-life assistance, with display-based "eyes" and AI-driven conversational and gesture interaction developed with Osaka University's Nagai Lab. The longer-term vision Kawasaki sets out is humanoid teleoperation: operators in safe locations controlling humanoids that take on hazardous tasks at disaster sites or industrial facilities.