GetRobo Blog English

The Genuine Great King Kizer follows "Moore's Law"

 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.

Where can I buy MANOI GO?

 Since the MANOI GO made a performance at the ROBO-ONE GATE dance competition late last month, GetRobo has received several emails asking about where they can purchase this robot.  

 So I asked Sadahiro Arai - owner of the robot shop Technologia in Akihabara Tokyo. MANOI GO was developed by  MANOI producer Masayuki Okamoto and robot builder Dr. GIY. It's not meant to be a mass produced product but they are willing to customize and sell it to you for about 300,000 yen (about $3,400 in today's exchange rate).  It will include all the motion data and clothing but NOT the head spin component, which is too bad because I think most of the people that wanted to buy this were interested in the head spin. The reason for that is because the head spin component needs to be adjusted each time and they won't be able to provide the maintenance/support after they sold you the robot. 

 If you are still interested in owning this robot, please contact Arai-san at Technologia  or GetRobo. Meanwhile here is a video from the recent dance competition.

ROBO-ONE Dancing Robots

 Biped Robot News Japan has lots of videos of dancing robots. Via Robots Dreams.

 My favorite.

ROBO-ONE Champion Robot - OmniZero.9 - Truly amazing!

 The 16th ROBO-ONE competition was held this weekend in Toyoma, Japan. And the champion belt went to OmniZero.9 .  A great video by respected journalist and popular blogger Kazumichi Moriyama of the robot doing a demonstration. Takeshi Maeda, the creator of the OmniZero series, gets on his newest robot. It is AMAZING what the ROBO-ONE participants continue to accomplish!! And it's not like they can spend millions of dollars in R&D like the Hondas and Toyotas of the world.

Cucumber slicing robot

 There's already been some reports about the cool robots at FOOMA JAPAN 2009, but here's another really cute food-handling robot that showed off it's skills there. And guess what? It's actually the ROBO-ONE robot Dynamizer made by the Sugiura Family! And the robot next to it is the Arimoplena by the Sumii Family sorting products. Since when did the battling bots start appearing at food trade shows?? In any case, that's great!