Just when you thought it was safe to sleep soundly, Only in Japan returns to fill your head with the neon nightmares and frightening futuristic tech from the Land of the Rising Sun which keep your Gadget Helpline bloggers awake at night! If you’re familiar with our irregular Far Eastern feature you will know the Japanese are nuts about robots, from ridable titans to battling ‘borgs – particularly replicating real-life through machines.
With that in mind, let us introduce you to Kenshiro, as robotic torso which can mimic many of the movements that we as humans can quite easily. Kenshiro resembles the stuff of sci-fi movie’s gone wrong, a headless auton skeleton is created by the University of Tokyo under developer Yuto Nakanishi and stands at five foot one inch tall and weighs around 7 stone. The skinless droid is designed to perform a number of the same motions as a you or I, as if it had actual muscles over it’s metal endoskeleton.
And as you will see in the promo video below which shows Kenshiro dissected and perversely pulled around to demonstrate his skills, the bot can shrug its shoulders, raise and twist it’s arms, swing and kick out it’s legs and tilt it’s spine in complex manuevers – They may not be as sharp or as smooth as an actual person’s, and his walking may look like he desperately needs the robo potty, but it’s another disturbing glimpse of the future from the Japanese, who have clearly not seen that 80s documentary called The Terminator which has it all sussed out!
Kenshiro made his first public appearance at an Osaka robotics event recently.
Fancy a festive visit to the Far East? Check out our look at the fascinating Christmas craze replacing the traditional tree with a glowing Godzilla – Only in Japan!