The Somewhat Ambitious

I’ve always contended that robots were pretty much the single most disappointing thing about growing up. When you were a kid robots were Transformers, giant mechanised beings capable of both changing into a variety of vehicles and beating the living piss out of one another. And then you grew up and you realised that robotic conflict in the modern world essentially consisted of two glorified shoeboxes with buzzsaws attached being pushed into one another by fat, dateless men wielding remote controls whilst an increasingly desperate looking, post-Red Dwarf Lister commentated from the sidelines. Thank you Robot Wars.

Fortunately the Japanese seem to be one of the few remaining forces trying to make our childhood fantasies a reality.¹ In this case: domestic robots, designed to fulfil our every slothful desire! So yes, we’re not exactly talking Evangelion-grade city destroyers here, but that dude up the top does look a little bit like a Gundam outtake (coming up next: At Home with the Gundams!) so perhaps it’s a step in the right direction. This guy, rather unimaginatively named Kitchen Robot, can both pour you a cup of tea AND wash the cup afterwards. And then defend your home from rampaging cyborgs. I may have made the last bit up. Also included on “>this list are a robot that can flip pancakes, a robot that can essentially lift you out of bed in the morning and a robot that can serve drinks (I’m noticing a theme here…) as well as open doors. As you can see, the violent robot uprising is just around the corner.

Although any talk of robot violence is always a good opportunity to bring up one of my favourite Wikipedia pages: deaths caused by industrial robots. There’s only been two to date, but the more notable/exciting was the 1981 death of Japan’s (natch) Kenji Urada, who forgot to turn off a robot while performing ‘routine maintenance’ on it, which was all the opportunity the robot needed to push him into a grinding machine. Hell of a way to go. With history like that behind them, it’s amazing that the Japanese are still so embracing of robotics really.

/Luke

¹ I’m so glad that over the last 100 odd years the Japanese have gone from being an aggressive, warlike society trying to forcibly dismantle the Pacific Rim, to becoming a peace-loving country of ultra-polite introverts whose main goal in life appears to be the creation of novelty products for the rest of the world to laugh at. How times change.