WABOT-1
Waseda completed the world's first full-scale anthropomorphic robot: it walked on two legs, saw, grasped objects and answered in Japanese.
Why it matters
Putting every faculty into one body showed how expensive each of them separately is.
The machine had vision, hearing and speech, limbs with tactile sensors, and a static bipedal gait. Its mental level was assessed as roughly that of a one-and-a-half-year-old child, and a single step took tens of seconds. Ichiro Kato led the project; this line of work defined the Japanese school of humanoid robotics for the next half century.