ATTACK!!

16 Sep 2005 Category: Japan, Products, Technology

Japan has had a rather public love-affair with robots ever since the 1960s, when the cartoon “Astroboy” (Tetsuwan Atomu) - a story about a robot boy - was a massive hit nationwide. Since then Japan has continued a traditional of robot-based comic and cartoon characters, such as the incredibly popular Gundam and Macross empires - which despite being decades-old franchises, still manage to capture the imaginations of young and old alike.

However Japan isn’t content with simply drawing robots for cartoons - Japan is also on the forefront of robotics technology and research. Not a week goes by in this country without an announcement of some new kind of robot that does something interesting, or fills yet another esoteric gap in the labour market of activities human beings either can’t be arsed to do or find too dangerous to do. Lets take a look at 3 recent examples…

Kansei is a new project from Waseda University that is an exercise in expressing human emotions, and takes the form of an ominous, severed head. Kansei is a robotic face covered with artificial skin that has the ability to contort in a realistic manner according to what it hears. The team working on Kansei created a database of over 430’000 words and Kansei can recognise these words in combinations and decide if the response warrants, for example, a smile or a frown. I suppose the aim of Kansei is to get that one step closer to the holy grail of robotics - a robot that can be indistinguishable from a real human being. Of course, for all Kansei’s technological prowess, I can’t help but be deterred from thinking how human-like it’s facial expressions are since Kansei resembles something that you might find in a serial murderer’s fridge. Those cold, bulging eyes are going to give me nightmares for MONTHS.

Here is a video clip of Kansei in action. It’s strangely mesmerising but at the same time undeniably disturbing. It reminds me of Ash’s head at the end of Alien after he goes all spastic and tells everyone they are going to die:

The next robot, developed by Sogo Security Services, is effectively ED-209 from the Robocop movie, except maybe not quite as homicidal. It patrols a set area and keeps a look out for intruders, fires and even water leaks. I can see the scene now - “MR PRESIDENT CODE YELLOW CODE YELLOW, DON’T TURN ON THE SHOWER! There’s no hot water, give us a few minutes”. Fantastic. But in all seriousness, this robot is actually trying to address a genuine problem - that of Japan’s aging population. Around 1/5 of Japan’s population is over 65 and that figure is expected to rise to 1/3 by 2040, which means a shortage of labour - this robot and ones like it will hopefully fill a gap that a shortage of human labour will leave wide open.

Above, I mentioned “activities human beings can’t be arsed to do” and this is where our next machine, NEC’s madcap “tasting” robot comes in. This robot (which incidentally looks exactly like a Shy-guy from Super Mario) uses an infra-red beam to analyse food products and measure factors such as their absorbency level - it is so accurate that it can actually distinguish cheese by brand. Along with this, it can tell you the nutritional content (fat/sugar etc) of foods.

“You. Are. Eating. A. Kraft. Cheese. Slice”

“I know, I just took it out of the packet”

Written by Jon

Hi my name is Kansei!
Hi my name is Kansei!
..and I'm going to eat your legs
..and I'm going to eat your legs


"Sorry sir, he's not normally this excited"
NEC's cute food-analyser
NEC's cute food-analyser

beepbeeeeep APPLE
beepbeeeeep APPLE

16 Comments

  1. how come I am under the impression that you are not exactly the lets-fully-endorse.the-new-technology type? I for one can’t w8 for this to evolve. what would today be like without the Japanese love for technology?

    Posted by: drone9 on September 17th, 2005 at 6:00 am

  2. nah, I just tend to mock what I don’t understand. Which is EVERYTHING.

    Posted by: Jon on September 20th, 2005 at 1:19 pm

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