KYOTO—A made-in-Japan humanoid that’s part of a project to help the country make up for lost ground in android development got off to a shaky start.

Until now, pretty much all humanoid robots have come with an eye-watering price tag. Rotaku, a startup from the San Francisco Bay Area, thinks that's a solvable engineering problem and made its first ...

What if owning a humanoid robot wasn’t just the domain of tech giants or research institutions, but something you could achieve for the price of a mid-range smartphone? It sounds like science fiction, ...