Robot maker CrazyLabo and the Kitakyushu National College of Technology, both in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan have developed a female humanoid and a dog robot that sniff a person’s breath and feet and use snarky remarks and exaggerated reactions to encourage offenders to do something about their breath and body odor. The female robot, Kaori-chan, has brown hair and blue eyes. When a person breathes in her face, she analyzes and quantifies components in their breath, and evaluates the smell on a scale of one to four.


If their breath smells good, Kaori-chan says, It smells like citrus! The stinkier the breath, the harsher are Kaori-chan’s remarks, ranging from, Yuck! You have bad breath! to No way! I can’t stand it!. When Kaori-chan judges someone’s breath is in the worst category she shouts, Emergency! There’s an emergency taking place! That’s beyond the limit of patience. To evaluate the odors, CrazyLabo draws on a commercially available odor sensor that can monitor and quantify various airborne odorous components.

The dog robot, Shuntaro-kun, can assess the smell of a person’s feet. With Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 as background music, Shuntaro-kun sniffs the user’s feet and bobs his head and nestles up next to the person or barks or falls down and growls, according to the level of the odor. If Shuntaro-kun passes out, you know you really have smelly feet. Shuntaro-kun can identify the type of the odor and assess its strength. He quantifies them and sends the data to an embedded computer. Kaori-chan can also quantify the strength of two odor components to judge levels of smell.

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