Waseda University X NCM | Professor Tetsuya Ogata

When Intelligence Lives in the Body: A Conversation with Professor Tetsuya Ogata

Waseda University Professor Tetsuya Ogata on embodied AI, the philosophy behind humanoid robots, and why the brain cannot be understood in isolation from the body.

What happens when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is given a body? For Professor Tetsuya Ogata, Professor at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, this question has defined more than 30 years of research, and it is one that is becoming impossible to ignore.

Professor Ogata works at the intersection of neural networks and robotics, developing AI systems that do not just process information but act in, and adapt to, the physical world. His current project, AIREC, is a humanoid robot designed to operate in care environments. These robots work in close proximity to human bodies and in unpredictable situations, where the stakes of getting things wrong are real, requiring them to learn and adapt.

His thinking is shaped by a deep history. Waseda University is home to the WABOT project, which produced the world's first full-scale humanoid robot, WABOT, in 1973, followed by WABOT-2 a decade later, which could read sheet music and play a keyboard.

These early experiments in giving machines a human form were not merely engineering feats; they were philosophical propositions about what it means to be human. Professor Ogata, one of the last students of WABOT's founding director Professor Ichiro Kato, has carried that spirit of inquiry into the age of deep learning.

Central to his work is a concept he calls deep predictive learning: a framework that trains robots not just to replicate behaviour, but to anticipate the consequences of their own actions and update their understanding when reality diverges from expectation. It is an approach grounded in neuroscience, and one that challenges a persistent assumption in mainstream AI — that intelligence is essentially computational, and that a body is simply a vessel for running it.

We sat down with Professor Ogata to talk about the misunderstood relationship between embodiment and intelligence, the legacy of WABOT, the technical and ethical challenges of deploying physical AI in care settings, and what it might mean for a robot to have something like a mind.

Tetsuya Ogata holds B.S., M.S., and D.Eng. degrees in mechanical engineering from Waseda University, where his research career began under the mentorship of the late Professor Ichiro Kato, pioneer of the WABOT humanoid robot programme. After graduating, he served as a research associate at Waseda before joining the RIKEN Brain Science Institute as a research scientist from 2001 to 2003. He then spent nearly a decade as associate professor at the Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University, before returning to Waseda as a full professor in 2012.

Since 2020, he has served as director of the Institute for AI and Robotics at Waseda University. He is also a joint-appointed fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Research Center at AIST, a visiting professor at the Research and Development Center for Large Language Models at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), and chairperson of the AI Robot Association (AIRoA).

His research focuses on machine intelligence that interacts with dynamic environments, pursued through constructivist approaches combining robot systems with deep learning. This spans predictive learning, imitation learning, linguistic-behavioural integration, human-robot cooperation, and multimodal active sensing. He has published over 640 papers and his work has attracted more than 9,000 citations.

He has served as director of both the Robotics Society of Japan and the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence. His awards include a Teaching Award from Waseda University, multiple best paper awards at IEEE and international AI conferences, and recognition from the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineering. In 2023 he received the Japanese Ministry of Education's Science and Technology Award for his research on robot multitask learning through deep predictive learning.

Tokyo-based film crew

Videographer: Shinya Miyazawa

Production support and translation: Mari Mori

Production coordination: Amanda Lynn Imasaka

Additional b-roll: courtesy of Waseda University

Interview filmed at Waseda University, Tokyo

Melbourne-based film crew

Exhibition b-roll: Dave Meagher

Editor: Dave Meagher

Subtitle/translation support: Chris Poole Translation