GetRobo Blog English

Panasonic robot washes your hair

 Have you ever been to a hairdresser/barber shop in Japan? Well, in general, they do a really good job washing your hair in the beginning. They don't splash water all over your shirt, and moreover, it feels so good that I sometimes almost fall asleep.

 So I hope this robot from Panasonic has learned the techniques from them. Because if so, there may be a bigger market out there than the assistive care segment that the company is originally targeting. Not that the assistive care market in itself is a small market either, since there are a growing number of elderly people in Japan that have a hard time taking a shower by themselves and there are not enough people that can help.

 In ways, the robot may be better. The robot has 16 fingers instead of 10. It scans your head and will adjust it's movement according to the shape of it. See the video below.

 You can see more robot videos from the 2010 International Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition on NODE.   

And now the hulk - 100 kg carrying robot named 'core'

 If HRP-4 is the trim athlete, core is the hulk. Or part of it. Core is a huge pair-of-legs developed by the Future Robotics Technology Center (fuRo) at Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. The legs are 2 meters long and weigh 230 kg. It can carry up to 100 kg (220 lb).

It is the first prototype of fuRo's Human Boardable Bipedal Robot Project.

 The main components, such as the motor (photo left) and impact absorption system (right), were developed at fuRo and the plan is to commercialize them so that people in the industry can use them to build their own systems.

Here are a couple of videos. The first is the walk. (Anyone think Avatar?) The second shows it doing a workout with a 100kg payload.

Well, 2 major robot announcements in 2 days. How better can it get?

[NEWS] New humanoid HRP-4 is SO COOL and only $300,000

 Just in from Kazumichi Moriyama who let us know via Twitter that the new humanoid robot HRP-4 will be sold to universities and research institutes for 26,000,000 yen - which today is a little over $300,000 with the yen still being high.

 HRP-4 - just annouced in Japan yesterday- was developed by Kawada Industries and AIST. Moriyama-san was at the press conference. Kawada plans to start selling HRP-4 worldwide starting January 2011 according to it's press release.

 You gotta see this video. It's amazing that this robot is  5 feet tall (151 cm) and weighs only 86 lb (39 kg).

 And it's interesting because the robot looks both male and female. Like when it makes the body-builder pose at around 1:12 in the video, it looks masculine. And at 2:22 when it puts it's right leg forward, it looks feminine. At least to me. I also realized that it has more degrees of freedom than myself when it reaches for it's back at 1:51. I can't do this because I am getting old and I have a frozen shoulder.

 Here is a longer video where you can see it following faces and a pink ball in the end.

 Are we getting closer to this?