ROBO-ONE Helper Robot Contest - Part 2 of 4

=Continued from Part 1 of 4=

So who were the winners?

Third place went to the humanoid robot Dynamizer made by the Sugiura Family. Dynamizer is already well known in and outside of Japan as a robot that does many outdoor activities - such as skiing, fishing and mowing the lawn. Tomio Sugiura (dad) is CEO of Sugiura Machine Design Office. Below Dynamizer tries to buy a pair of socks and he succeeds in getting another pair for free. (Haggling got extra points.)

Second place was FIVE developed by Robot Force, the robotics division of L.L.Palace. FIVE was one of the larger robots -if not the largest - standing 80cm high and weighing about 7kg. From the back, it looked like a 3-4 year old boy going shopping. Below is a photo of FIVE and a video taken during a demo. It was unique in a way that it had 2 buttons on each side of its head and it asked the store clerk to press either of these buttons to say yes or no to questions.

And first prize winner was the Sumii Family that developed Arimoplena - which was by far the most stable robot at this competition. Below are 2 videos of Arimoplena. You can see how the robot was operated in the second video. Besides the supreme camera, audio and manipulation techniques, there was one more clever aspect about this robot that I thought is notable and probably really important when thinking about commercializing this kind of robot in the future.

That is, Arimoplena was constantly generating sounds to let the humans around it know what it was doing or what it was about to do. For example, when it was walking it would say "Teku teku" and when it was turning it would repeat "Kuru kuru" - both words that describe these movements in Japanese. Allowing humans to easily figure out what the robots are thinking/doing is key for them to be adopted in society. It can be pretty scary and dangerous if we couldn't.

The champion Sumii Family (photographed below) consists of Kazuhiro Sumii (right), Nanako Sumii (middle) and their daughter Arina Sumii. They plan to use the 1 million yen (about 9,600 U.S. dollars)　prize to build future robots.

Below is the award ceremony.

=Continues to Part 3 of 4=

Comments

[Khalil Merroun]

Please help me to contact Kazuhiro Sumii

Khalil Merroun
from Holland (the Netherlands)