Guide

The İstanbul Robot Museum is a private museum, registered with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's Directorate General of Cultural Heritage and Museums, that opened on 15 December 2022 to show sixteen years of robotics work by the Turkish firm AKINROBOTICS. It occupies 1,024 square metres inside the AKINSOFT İstanbul Plaza, a building redesigned during a refit so that it could hold a museum, and the collection is laid out over two exhibition floors.

The collection exists because the company kept everything it built. Robot development began in 2009 as a department within AKINSOFT; the results were first put on show in 2015 at a café and robotics centre in Konya, then moved to the company's Konya factory, part of which was turned over to display. The museum in İstanbul is where that accumulation ended up, and the company describes the Konya plant as the first humanoid robot factory in the world and this museum as the first of its kind.

What is on display, by the museum's own count: 105 robots, 214 motors and motor parts used in building them, 805 electronic circuits developed in house, 442 mechanical products and 241 sketches — 8,688 robotic items in all, arranged so that you can follow how each line developed over time. The categories run from humanoid robots driven by artificial intelligence through social, service, agricultural, field, cleaning and industrial machines, alongside the smart actuators, BLDC motors, control boards, development kits and injection moulds behind them. A separate section is given over to the work of Dr Özgür Akın, the chairman who founded the robotics department.

Much of the visit is hands on, and guides who specialise in the technology take you round. You can play noughts and crosses against a robot arm, watch the quadruped ARAT take obstacles and courses, and talk and dance with the ADA-7, which will also mirror your movements; an interaction wall takes visitors into a digital layer of the museum. Mini ADA, the small social robot the company sends out to meet children, is kept here too, and there are robotics workshops laid on for young visitors.

Visitors can also trace the development of AKINCI, which the company presents as Türkiye's first humanoid robot, and see the Cadde Meram café in Konya where robot waiters served customers — a project the company says held the title of the world's first robotic application centre while it was running.