Donut Robotics launches Cinnamon 1 humanoid
Cinnamon 1 uses an overseas OEM body, with Donut Robotics developing VLM, VLA and gesture-control software in Japan.
Donut Robotics has launched Cinnamon 1, a mass-produced bipedal humanoid robot equipped with the company’s AI stack and Silent Gesture Control. The Tokyo company describes Cinnamon 1 as the first mass-produced bipedal humanoid from a Japanese brand, initially aimed at construction sites and factories, with a height of about 170 cm and weight of about 70 kg.
Donut Robotics was founded in 2014 in a garage in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, and incorporated in 2016. The company’s early path ran through communication and service robots rather than humanoid bodies: it was selected for the Haneda Airport Robot Project in 2017, later showed at CES, and built Cinnamon, a small communication robot installed in settings including airports and welfare facilities.
Donut Robotics was already working on human-facing robot interfaces, facility use cases and multilingual service before Cinnamon 1. Its customer-service robot, Cinnamon Guide, is listed with patrol, shoplifting-prevention, customer-service, translation and sales-support functions, priced from 62,000 yen per month or 2.2 million yen including tax.
The Team
CEO Taisuke Ono founded Donut Robotics after teaching himself product design and launching his first venture at 22. The company’s technical team includes CTO Ozora Ogino, who works across generative AI, computer vision and natural-language processing, and chief engineer Takafumi Okabe, who joined the Cinnamon project in 2016 and leads software and hardware work.
Head of Strategy Rikiya Yamamoto previously led the humanoid robotics division at SoftBank Robotics, technology advisor Ayumu Tokaji worked on JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration project after aerospace roles in the United States, and advisor Tomoki Fukushima came from Honda R&D after leading electrical, electronic systems and AI development work tied to industrial robotics.
Cinnamon 1 combines an overseas OEM body with Donut Robotics’ own AI, with the company saying it plans to make both hardware and software domestically in Japan in the future. Donut Robotics frames the body as the commoditised part of the humanoid stack and identifies VLA control software as the higher-value layer it wants to build locally.
The robot currently uses a VLM for image and language understanding, while Donut Robotics says it has begun work on its own VLA system to handle the path from language understanding to action. The distinctive interface claim is Silent Gesture Control, which lets a person control the humanoid through gestures rather than voice commands.
Donut Robotics says Cinnamon 1 has been introduced to major companies, which it has not named.
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