Hitoshi Takahashi spent 11 years building this giant beetle robot just by himself as a hobby. Rhinoceros beetle in Japanese is "Kabutomushi" -thus the robot's name. It's 11 meters long and weighs 15 tons (estimate). It walks and can take up as many as 5 to 7 people. See photos of it being transported here.
Appeared on TV below.
A group of companies in Osaka are joining force to build a 5.6 feet (170 cm) bipedal robot that looks like its well-known landmark - the Tsutenkaku tower. The Tsutenkaku Robo, which will come to life sometime in 2010, is aimed to promote Osaka city and it's businesses.
It won't be as tall as the 210 cm Hajime Robot but still should have a towering effect. The 30kg (66 lb) Tsutenkaku Robo will be constructed by Robot Force which in the past has built FIVE and many other robots.
Via NODE.
Happy Holidays to Everyone! And yes, this robot is REALLY playing the trumpet.
Did you know that the proper way to make miso soup is to boil the water then put miso in, but NOT to return to a boil after you put in the miso? Well, you can program Cooky to do just that, or anyway you want to do it. How neat!
A project by the Robotic Life Project at the Keio University Graduate School of Media Design. The main person behind it is Yuta Sugiura (who by the way is also the son of Tomio Sugiura, well-known for developing Dynamizer and other humanoid robots).
To copy the objective of developing Cooky:
"We propose a cooking system that operates in an open environment. The system cooks a meal by pouring various ingredients into a boiling pot on an induction heating cooker and adjusts the heating strength according to the user's instructions. We then describe how it successfully functions in a shared space with the user. First, we use small mobile robots instead of built-in arms to save space, improve flexibility and increase safety. Second, we use detachable visual markers to allow the user to easily configure the real-world environment. Third, we provide a graphical user interface to display detailed cooking instructions to the user. We hope insights obtained in this experiment will be useful for the design of other household systems in the future. "
Just sent in from robot builder Naoki Maru. A video of his newest creation - the Genuine Great King Kizer (or "Shin Great King Kizer" in Japanese), which stands 1 meter tall. (The robot looks a bit taller than the Maru Family's youngest son who is seen in the end of the video.)
According to Maru-san, the size of his robots have doubled every 12-18 months, which is like "Moore's Law" - well, sort of.
The newest Shin Great King Kizer uses 12 servo motors (KRS-6003HV) on each leg. That's 4 servos for each pitch axis. Overall, the robot uses 37 servos and has 25 degrees of freedom. (I checked the catalog and these servos cost 412,020 yen for a pack of 18, which is about $4,660 in today's exchange rate. So you do the math to find out how much it costs to build this robot.)
The Shin Great King Kizer won the ROBO-ONE Grand Prix which was held in November. It also participated in the "world's first" wrestling match between a robot and a professional (human) wrestler.
