Hitachi
Hitachi developed the EMIEW wheeled service humanoids between 2005 and 2016, including airport guide trials at Haneda.
- Type
- conglomerate
- Headquarters
- Tokyo, Japan
- Founded
- 1910
- Founders
- Namihei Odaira
- Status
- active
- Employees (est.)
- n/d
- Disclosed funding
- n/d
- Valuation
- n/d
- Listed
- TYO: 6501
- Website
- hitachi.com
What the record says.
Hitachi is a Tokyo industrial conglomerate founded in 1910 by Namihei Odaira and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Humanoids have only ever been a small research line inside it, and the company is included here for the EMIEW family, not for any current product.
The first EMIEW appeared in 2005: a 130 cm, 70 kg wheeled robot with 14 degrees of freedom and a top speed of 6 km/h, shown as a pair named Pal and Chum with a vocabulary of about 100 words. EMIEW2, announced in 2007, shrank the design to 80 cm and 13 kg. EMIEW3, announced on 8 April 2016, was 90 cm and 15 kg, could get up after a fall and was paired with a cloud 'remote brain' platform so that one operator could watch several robots at once.
The only documented use was a proof-of-concept run by Hitachi's Building Systems unit with Japan Airport Terminal at Haneda's domestic Terminal 2 from September 2016, testing Japanese and English guidance in a noisy hall. Hitachi's own 2017 review said it would step up work toward commercialisation but set no date, and no EMIEW product, price or sale has been published since. The programme should be read as a finished trial rather than an active humanoid effort.