Bouncing Red Ball

Wakamaru, the boy-faced robot from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, debuts in a play staged at Osaka University in Japan. Entitled “Hataraku Watashi” (I, Worker), the play, written by playwright and Osaka University professor Oriza Hirata, explores the relationship of humans and the robots that are tasked to assist them in their everyday chores.
In the 20-minute play, [...]

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

“A new robot developed by the University of Tokyo and Toyota Motor Corp., able to collect the washing and move furniture for cleaning, is being touted as the first step towards a robotic domestic helper.”
“Robots have traditionally been bad at handling anything other than solid objects, but the robot named, “AR,” is able to recognize [...]

Robots come in many different shapes: there are humanoid robots, robots shaped like seals, dogs, snakes, bugs and dinosaurs but this is probably the first known robot that is shaped like a flower.
Korean researchers have developed a hibiscus-shaped robot that can simultaneously be used as humidifier and air freshener. When approached, the robot bends its [...]

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 [...]