Robots Blog

Hajime has always been fascinated with robots, and when he started his company to design and build humanoids he decided the company’s slogan (or war cry) would be “I want to build Gundam!” From the looks of the robot he put on the field at the Japan RoboCup Open 2009 competition, he just might be well on the way to realizing his dream.

The 49th All Japan PLAMODEL RADICON Show (PLAstic MODEL RADIoControl) will take place October 8th through the 11th at the Makuhari Messe Convention Center complex in Chiba. The first two days, Thursday and Friday, are only open to the trade, but on Saturday and Sunday the show is open to the general public. While the show concentrates primarily on more traditional modeling hobby crafts, like trains, cars, and planes, in...

Maptor is a compact and stylish concept device that will resolve these problems in an innovative way. You can download a map on this device and it will let you project the map onto any flat surface such as wall, ground or even on your hand. Moreover, this device includes a GPS that will indicate [...]

Shaking your phone a few times unlocks a hidden augmented reality mode called Monocle, that shows reviews for anything you point your camera at. Called “Monocle,” it’s an Easter egg within Yelp. As in, Yelp 3.0, the one that’s currently available on the App Store. When I first read a tweet about it, I was [...]

The Walt Disney Company just announced an agreement to purchase Marvel Entertainment, the developer of popular characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four, and Thor. The deal has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies, but still requires approval by the appropriate regulatory authorities as well as the Marvel shareholders. According to a report on Playthings.com: “Under the terms of the agreement, Marvel shareholders...

On Thursday (September 3rd), Bandai will be releasing the latest in a long line of character robot toys, “My DORAEMON”, billed as the “21 Century Communication Robot”. Always a favorite with youngsters and their parents who grew up watching the robotic space cat on TV, the new DORAEMON bot is primarily intended to interact with the user by voice messages, rolling its eyes, rotating its head, lighting LEDs in its...

A little over two weeks ago we broke the news about Jin Sato’s cute new, low-cost, educational robot propelled by toothbrush heads. We were lucky enough to get a prerelease briefing from the Robot Master and now that the product has been officially released we can talk about some of the details. The initial configuration is the “Ladybug JX-TTM” pictured above. Of course anyone with a little graphic design skill,...

According to a story reported by Asahi.com, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) is developing special undersea robots in response to strong international competition in the discovery, exploration, and extraction of rare metals on the ocean bottom. The robots will be remote controlled via cables and equiped with a number of special sensors to facilitate marine mineral exploration research. The larger of the two undersea robots will...

The new Robovie-Nano from Vstone, scheduled to start shipping in Japan later this month, looks pretty good, at least on paper. We’re going to holdback on making any firm judgments until we get the chance to actually evaluate a unit up close and personal, but from what we’ve seen so far, the Robovie-Nano will definitely be a strong low-end, low-cost humanoid robot competitor. According to its pre-release specifications, the new...

HotProceed Japan, the same company responsible for developing the Blaser Robot Laser Tag system, is set to introduce the MakerBot 3–D Modeling System to Japan. The MakerBot modeler, sold under the “CupCake CNC Basic Kit” name here, allows developers to create 3–D models of their creations at a very affordable price, and under their own control directly in their lab real time instead of having to depend on more expensive...