Pepper Robots are starting to appear on the second hand market, ebay etc. Some are even "not working" models for around $2500 US. Shipping from Japan sometimes appears to be more expensive than the robot itself.
I was considering buying a broken one and my logic was I get the casing servo's motors screen in a professional robot shell, but not really sure the level of complexity in hacking these and integrating servos cameras sensors with EZ-B and if it is really worth the money or better off building an inmoov or similar. I printed an inmoov hand and forearm but time 3D printing cleaning up, servos etc... and I can't use in a business setting as the license is restricted.
There is a tear down with photos here but not really a lot of details. https://tech.nikkeibp.co.jp/dm/english/NEWS_EN/20150625/424978/
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Yep done all that, Hacked the meccanoid, built a telepresence bot from a Roomba, pretty good collection of various Humanoids bots I have working and a large selection of EZ-Robots.
Really looking to build something that looks professional for a greeter / way finding bot.
example Hi Josh how can I help? I am looking for the shampoo. Sure it is in isle 5. Where is that? follow me. All fairly basic but really wanted to look professional for a prototype.
I was in Tokyo in the summer I played with a couple of Peppers and was very impressed in their clean design and capabilaites. IBM has intu a robot development platform that works with NAO and pepper and I want to go that route but I can't afford to fork out 30 to 40K for a pepper and If I buy a non working one and can't get it to work I have thrown 5K away or perhaps I can salvage with EZ-Robot. https://github.com/watson-intu
But the usefulness of the arms and hands would be challenging to work with.
Now the inmoov isn’t much better. The hands are really awful to work with. But the arms at least have great precision of all joints. The fingers are only decoration - if crooked fingers can be considered decoration
The inmoov does give you a fun challenge of printing and building. Where the pepper gives you a lighter challenge of hacking, with less capability at the end though.
If those are the two options...
So since they both have hand issues, I’d go with the inmoov and work on making it better.
From what you describe, I dont really see why you would want a humanoid robot though. It makes everything more complicated an expensive, while at the same time, a non humanoid robot could be more fun and much more practical. Unless you achieve near perfection, a humanoid robot will always look awkward and, well, not very professional because we expect humanoid to move and behave like humans, which we know is really hard to pull off. OTOH, who wouldnt want to be guided to the correct isle by something resembling a Wall-E ? and that would be far easier to achieve