February 07, 2006
Tokyo schoolkids get a robot guard
The Asahi Shimbun reports that a primary school in Tokyo is experimenting with stationing a robot at its entrance to register its pupils' movements in and out and guard against intruders. Approach within four metres and the robot will hold out its right hand and ask you to hold your ID card over the IC chip reader in its palm; once you do, it will greet you by name and let you know that your teacher has been informed of your arrival or departure. If you have no card it will ask for a name and, should you not be pre-registered, will call a member of staff and instruct you to wait. Being distinctly unthreatening--it's only a metre tall and 30kg in weight, and doesn't carry any weapons or alarms--its orders may not carry much force, but it does have digital cameras mounted in its head to photograph the face of anyone trying to slip through.
[Via asahi.com (Japanese)]
February 03, 2006
Enryu rescue robot in snow-mode
Our favourite rescue robot, Enryu, is back in action this week, busting moves out in the snow-choked countryside of Japan. PC Watch has photos and some video of it in action, most of which is humdrum snow-clearing stuff; however, the footage of it picking up and moving a car (1MB WMV) is quite impressive.
Yahoo! News is also carrying an Associated Press piece about this (no pictures, though).
[Via PC Watch (Japanese)]
August 18, 2004
Japan's schools to adopt Lego Mindstorms
Given Japan's general robocentricity the question should perhaps be "why did it take them so long?", but Lego Japan has apparently teamed up with a company called Eiwa System Management to offer a system called Warp5500 that uses Lego Mindstorms technology to provide a Ministry of Education-approved curriculum for junior high school students that teaches them how to build robots. Given that our exposure to computers, let alone robots, in school amounted to programming BASIC on a BBC B, we're wondering if we weren't born too early. The learning curve for teachers can't be getting any easier, though.
[Via Ascii24 (Japanese)]
August 16, 2004
Robot tuna watcher
Forgive us the visual pun; since they haven't built this yet, the closest we could get was a robot tuna, not a robot tuna watcher. Anyway. Japan is planning to replace the observers who currently accompany fishing boats hunting tuna and bonito with a robot mounted at the centre of the boat that will take video of the catches and allow confirmation back on dry land that nothing irregular has gone on, in the interests of maintaining fishing stocks. While this strikes us as something that you could do fairly well with a video camera and a motion detector, there are no bounds to Japan's ability to develop ways to make the lives of its government employees easier. Sad, then, that roadworks are invariably accompanied by several old men in uniforms waving torchlike batons, often next to a cardboard cutout with a motorized arm that's doing the exact same thing.
[Crossposted to Engadget]
[Read: Japan Today: Robot to monitor tuna catches to cut costs]
August 10, 2004
This year's ROBO-ONE, endorsed by...Aerosmith?
Japan's ROBO-ONE tournament, a yearly fixture in which a multitude of amateur robot developers gather together their creations and have them beat one another up, gained an unwitting and unusual supporter this year: Aerosmith's Steven Tyler. He apparently saw a relative of the robot above on display in Tokyo and was so taken with it that he ended up autographing its sibling. (More photos and video of the proceedings at PC Watch at the link below.)
[Via PC Watch (Japanese)]
June 21, 2004
Sony prepares to make the Qrio smarter than us
According to the Nikkei newspaper, Sony’s next project for its little Qrio robot is to up its brainpower to near-supercomputer levels. Given its size, it doesn't come as much of a surprise to find that they're not going to try and shoehorn something into its head. Instead, the plan is to link it via a high-speed wireless connection to a grid of 250 computers that'll do the thinking. The upshot is that rather than giving the Qrio instructions, they’ll be letting it work things out for itself. Details beyond that are scant (we can't find a press release on this from Sony yet, either), but we assume they're thinking of something considerably more advanced than having it wander around and avoid walking into the walls. Given how big an emphasis Sony has placed so far on making the Qrio appear to interact naturally with the meat world, it seems safe to suppose that further improving its social skills could well be a big part of the latest grand experiment.
[Via the Nikkei Shimbun (Japanese)]
June 09, 2004
Robo erectus
Kyoto University's Robo Garage has announced a robot that comes a little closer to walking like a human. The Chroino is apparently able to keep the leg in contact with the ground straight as it walks, instead of the awkward both-knees-bent shimmy common to brethren from Honda's Asimo to Sony's Qrio. The Chroino measures about 35 cm in height and weighs about a kilo. It apparently only cost about Y3 mn to develop, and would probably cost about Y0.5 mn were it to go into production, which isn't too far out of Aibo territory.
We're unable to find any video of this at the moment, unfortunately; will update when and if we do.
[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]