Pepper was the best-known product of Aldebaran, which was owned by SoftBank and URG. Source: Aldebaran
Aldebaran, the producer of the Nao and Pepper humanoid robots, reportedly filed for bankruptcy in mid-February and has laid off much of its staff as it looks for another buyer. The robots were well-known in educational and service applications.
Bruno Maisonnier founded Aldebaran in 2005. Its bipedal Nao and wheeled Pepper robots were designed with curved white surfaces and were shorter than adults to be non-threatening. Pepper had a tablet screen on its chest and had speakers for human-machine interaction.
A judicial panel yesterday put Paris-based Aldebaran in receivership. While several commenters expressed dismay on LinkedIn, the company‘s latest financial struggles came as no surprise.
“For two or three months, employees have known that [the compulsory liquidation] would be inevitable,” a legal representative of the company told the French press.
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Aldebaran was a robotics ambassador
Nao, Aldebaran’s first system, replaced Honda’s Asimo in the annual RoboCup soccer tournaments. The company released the first version of Pepper in 2014.
Aldebaran’s Romeo model was intended to be a research platform toward household applications — a notoriously difficult market to crack — but it was not as popular as the other models. Pepper and Nao were also limited in capability and robustness for commercial applications.
In comparison, today’s humanoids have better balance and autonomous navigation, have begun to manipulate items, and can interact with people more naturally thanks to recent advances in generative AI. But for many years, Pepper and Nao were ambassadors of robotics to the general public.
But in 2015, only 15% of companies planned to renew their three-year contracts for Pepper. The robot cost $30,000 in the U.S. or $2,000 with a $550 per month subscription fee for maintenance and software updates.
The company said it had sold about 20,000 Nao robots and 17,000 Pepper humanoids to 70 countries, but it stopped producing Pepper in 2020 or 2021.
From left: the Pepper, Nao, and Plato robots. Source: Aldebaran
SoftBank and URG part of ownership saga
Aldebaran isn’t the only humanoid robotics developer to change ownership — Boston Dynamics has been owned by Google, SoftBank, and Hyundai — but it never achieved the scale investors hoped for.
In 2012, SoftBank Group, which has invested in numerous robotics companies, acquired Aldebaran for $100 million. In 2016, Tokyo-based SoftBank rebranded the unit as part of its SoftBank Robotics Group, with facilities in the Europe, Asia, and the U.S., which posed its own cultural challenges.
SoftBank put Pepper robots in HSBC Banks to improve customer service, but several industry observers questioned at the time whether SoftBank had rushed what CEO Masayoshi Son had dubbed the “emotional robot” into production. HSBC’s regulatory troubles also didn’t help.
In 2018, Haier partnered with SoftBank Robotics to build a version of Pepper for its Smart Home platform and retailers in China.
In 2022, Bochum, Germany-based United Robotics Group (URG), founded by Thomas Hähn in 2019, acquired SoftBank Robotics Europe after months of negotiations. HAHN Automation had acquired collaborative robot pioneer Rethink Robotics after its own struggles in 2018 and relaunched it last year.
SoftBank Robotics Europe had already laid off nearly half its staff of 330 people at the time of the URG purchase. SoftBank said that the Whiz cleaning robot was its flagship system.
URG had been the primary distributor of Nao and Pepper in Europe since 2021. It then released the Plato hospitality “cobiot,” which cost $800 a month to lease. URG also rebranded SoftBank Robotics Europe back to Aldebaran.
In 2024, URG stopped funding Aldebaran, which recorded an operating loss of about $29 million for the previous year.
In April, Aldebaran laid off more staffers. The company recently fielded interest from two prospective buyers, but the deals fell through, leading to the receivership proceedings.
Aldebaran is still looking for buyers, but the fate of its remaining staff, support, and intellectual property is unclear. The Robot Report will continue following and sharing its story.
I think they might have succeeded if there hadnt been the prohibitively expensive monthly payments. If the robots could have operated on their own, they would have been great in shoos, museums and zoos, where they could have been guides, teachers and assistants.
The monthly costs were certainly an issue with Pepper, once the initial contract had expired. In the UK I worked with both Pepper and Nao, but specifically with Nao in the education sector. Having developed an application suite for use with children on the autism spectrum, I found great satisfaction in seeing Nao assist in the education of these children. Additionally, and even to this day, I still develop software for Pepper when used at exhibitions and events. It still has a powerful impact. For me the issue was how old the technology has become. The tablet on Pepper is slow and old, running Android 6, Academic Nao and Pepper still uses python 2.7, with inherent security issues leading to more complex solution for integration with such services as Generative AI, and less relevance in an education environment. I feel that Softbank abandoned Nao, then realised it was wrong and delivered the Nao 6, with all the same python issues as previous version. Pepper never seemed to keep up with the technology of the day. Perhaps a little thought on keeping the robots more current would have helped. All that said, I still greatly enjoy my personal Nao and Pepper.