Cybernetic human HRP-4C. Photo: AFP / Yoshikazu Tsuno
Japanese researchers have invented a catwalk model robot that will soon strut her stuff at Tokyo fashion shows.
The female humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and shoulder-length hair boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.
“Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C,” said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.
The fashion-bot is 5ft 2 ins, the average height of young Japanese women, but weighs in at a waiflike 95 pounds (43 kilos) – including batteries.
Appearing before photographers and television crews, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly via bluetooth devices.
The performance fell short of flawless when she occasionally mixed up her facial expressions – a mistake the inventors put down to a case of the nerves as a hail of camera shutters confused her sound recognition sensors.
She has a slightly manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.
“If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny,” said one of the inventors, humanoid research leader Shuji Kajita. “We have deliberately leant toward an anime style.”
The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment.
“We unveiled this to attract attention in society,” said Junji Ito, a senior official at the institute, who said he saw the HRP-4C as a stepping stone toward creating a humanoid industry.
“It’s important that people feel good about humanoids and want to work with them,” he said. “We shifted from a dry mechanical image to a very human image.”
The preview was a warm-up for the robot’s appearance at a Tokyo fashion show on March 23.
Like her real-life counterparts, HRP-4C commands a hefty price – the institute said developing and building her cost more than 200 million yen (£1.4 million).
Hirohisa Hirukawa, another researcher, said the institute hoped to commercialise the humanoid in future.
6 responses so far ↓
Randy Blaisure // March 17, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Gee, think it be much neater to work next to a real human, not a machine.
pjwalker911 // March 17, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Well, they don’t want us to have normal human interaction. They want to use robots for everything from war-fighting, to policing, to health-care, to baby-sitting, to you name it. Anything a human does today is to be done by robots in future. This is the agenda. Meanwhile humans are to be culled off down to a more manageable level while they are systematically transformed into cyborgs. At some point, the dream of the elite is to have it so that humans and machines are indistinguishable. That’s the “new man” made to serve the elite.
george // March 17, 2009 at 10:34 pm
creepy..
pjwalker911 // March 18, 2009 at 2:52 am
Think that’s creepy? They want us to literally “fall in love” with these things to the point they are talking about people marrying robots in future. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait till they unleash all these “swarming microbots” flying, swimming and crawling around for urban warfare and spying and nano-bots crawling, slithering, swimming and even reproducing or morphing inside the human body. And then if you saw Terminator II, you will remember the liquid robot T-1000 which could assume any shape and ooze out under doors. Then again in some newer scifi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still remake show similar things. This is all predictive programming to prepare our minds to accept it. They probably already have these nanotech robots that can assume any form, but publicly they admit working on their development as “chemical robots”. As always, there are public projects and the more advanced black projects behind them. The public are treated like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a lot of shit. It just goes on and on and it is extremely dangerous for humanity in the future.
Synchronized Face Electrocution | Onelargeprawn // March 18, 2009 at 9:19 am
[...] creating a violin-playing robot, a teacher robot, and a fashion model she-bot, the Japanese scientists were happy with the part they are playing in the forthcoming robot [...]
Wolfie Draco // July 8, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Of course they have nano bots. And of course they want the public in the dark. These so called advancements in robotics are just civilian models.
Their are more robots that are more human like to the point where they think no believe their human. Having robots isnt a bad thing but we need to give them the same rights has huamns.
It could also lead to cybernetic replacements for people with abnormalities or missing limbs and maybe more internal organs and body parts like new spin or even skeletal replacements.
Just remember, the goverments are hiding alot of things from normal people. Sooner or later, they’ll have to tell us or some one else will.