Developers look to widen repertoire of Pepper, Japan's laughing robot

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese developers of a robot are asking the public to come up with ideas for what their waist-high humanoid can do and they are offering a software development kit for programmers to get creative. The fast-selling robot, known as Pepper, can already laugh and serve coffee and is being used as a waiter, salesman and customer service representative in about 500 companies in Japan, including Nestle, Mizuho Bank and Nissan. Now its creators, SoftBank Corp, have started offering a kit, Pepper SDK for Android Studio, that will allow programmers to develop new tasks. The offer comes ahead of the July pre-sale launch of the robot in the United States. Pepper, which costs 198,000 yen ($1,800), has been in high demand in Japan. The first six batches of the robot, each averaging 1,000 units, sold out in less than a minute. ($1 = 109.9500 yen) (Writing by Karishma Singh in Singapore. Editing by Robert Birsel)