Bouncing Red Ball

Check out Toyota’s impressive-looking Lexus Premium 2-seater Sports LF-A, Gazoo Racing’s entry into the 24 Hours Nürburgring endurance racing in Nürburg, Germany, one of the most eye-catching muscle cars on display at the recent Tokyo Auto Salon in Makuhari Messe.
I bet this thing would outrun any one of those cars in the Road Monsters of [...]

Here’s a summary and lots of photos of robots that appeared at the recently held Robo-Japan 2008 exhibition in Pacifico Yokohama Hall.
The Robo-Japan 2008 poster outside the exhibition hall

The NetTansorWeb (NTW) doesn’t have Kitty-chan’s looks nor Plen’s rollerskating skills but it does one thing that other robots can’t: it blogs. This is probably the world’s first robot blogger, if you discount splogs that are created by net bots.
This harmless-looking robot might actually replace real bloggers in the future.

This Wi-Fi enabled robot has a [...]

At just 3.4cm, Takara Tomy’s Robo-Q is indeed small and you have to wonder how they fit the computer, sensors, actuators and battery in such a tiny bipedal, humanoid machine. It’s main purpose seems to play football and they have little soccer fields in Robo Japan with several of these robots kicking soccer balls (controlled [...]

Although not strictly robots, Nabaztag and Chumby are two of the most popular “smart objects”, so called because of their ability to connect to the Internet and interact with various Internet applications (to read news headlines, weather forecasts or email for example).
Nabaztag is a bunny-shaped (”nabaztag” is Armenian for “rabbit” I read) Wi-Fi enabled France-born [...]

The ACM-R5 snake robot is probably the least lovable robot in the recent Robo Japan exhibition but very impressive nonetheless. (A name made up of letters such as ACM-R5 is also decidedly more impersonal than, for example, Hello Kitty Robo.) But this is the work of university students (from the Hirose/Fukushima Robotics Lab of the [...]

Plen is one of my favorite robots. He is cuddly small, has a gorgeous face and a well-proportioned body. And did I mention already that he can skate?
Here are some of his photos from the recent Robo Japan exhibition.
Plen, the desktop robot.

Plen takes a rest.

Plen with a gorgeous face.

Plen lying down.

Plen with a giant billboard [...]

I just came back from Robo Japan, which is held in Minato Mirai, near Yokohama. The first batch of pictures from the exhibit is the i-SOBOT, winner of Japan’s Good Design award and billed by the company as Guiness-certified “world’s smallest humanoid robot in production”. (The Japanese brochure actually says, translated, “the world’s smallest bipedal [...]