  Japanese character figurines are popular and have pivot position in Otaku
culture. Although numerous robots have been developed, less have focused on
otaku-culture or on embodying the anime character figurine. Therefore, we take
the first steps to bridge this gap by developing Hatsuki, which is a humanoid
robot platform with anime based design. Hatsuki's novelty lies in aesthetic
design, 2D facial expressions, and anime-style behaviors that allows it to
deliver rich interaction experiences resembling anime-characters. We explain
our design implementation process of Hatsuki, followed by our evaluations. In
order to explore user impressions and opinions towards Hatsuki, we conducted a
questionnaire in the world's largest anime-figurine event. The results indicate
that participants were generally very satisfied with Hatsuki's design, and
proposed various use case scenarios and deployment contexts for Hatsuki. The
second evaluation focused on imitation learning, as such method can provide
better interaction ability in the real world and generate rich,
context-adaptive behavior in different situations. We made Hatsuki learn 11
actions, combining voice, facial expressions and motions, through neuron
network based policy model with our proposed interface. Results show our
approach was successfully able to generate the actions through self-organized
contexts, which shows the potential for generalizing our approach in further
actions under different contexts. Lastly, we present our future research
direction for Hatsuki, and provide our conclusion.
