Giant robot comes to life at night

Pink Tentacle has some amazing shots of the recently built giant Gundam robot in Shiokaze Park in Tokyo's Odaiba. The 35-ton, 60-foot model robot marks the 30th anniversary of the popular Gundam franchise and can emit all sorts of nifty lights.

Autonomous mini car to go on sale

Tokyo-based robot venture firm ZMP, known for its slick-looking Nuvo robot, is putting a mini robot car on sale that can autonomously avoid obstacles in its path.

The car is about a tenth the size of a real car and will be sold for R&D applications starting this month for around $5,000 (about twice as much with the stylish shell). It has a CCD camera and an infrared laser system to detect obstacles. It can also be controlled with a remote, and runs for about an hour when fully charged.

Why Japan lost the supercomputer race

The Earth Simulator is a massive supercomputer housed in a complex south of Yokohama. I once visited it and felt like I was face to face with the HAL 9000. Back then, the Earth Simulator was the fastest supercomputer in the world. It could perform 35 trillion calculations per second, and its speed so surprised U.S. computer scientists that its launch was dubbed the "Computenik" incident (after Sputnik). If 35 trillion isn't mind-boggling enough for you, its speed has since been dramatically upgraded to help model climate.

Today, though, the Earth Simulator ranks a lowly 73rd on the latest Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers (Roadrunner, a U.S. military computer that models nuclear weapons, is tops, performing more than a quadrillion calculations a second).

Meanwhile, only 17 machines on the Top500 are Japanese, compared with 290 American ones. Amid deteriorating corporate earnings, NEC and Hitachi recently announced they are quitting a government-led project to build a supercomputer in Kobe.

Why did Japan lose out in the supercomputer race? A recent Japan Times article speculates on three reasons: lower costs for the technology required, allowing more competitors, economic stagnation in Japan, and a lack of military funding. The third reason seems the most persuasive. U.S. machines are often used to model nuclear weapons; seven of the ten fastest supercomputers are at U.S. Department of Energy facilities.

Since Japan has no nuclear weapons arsenal, it has to get more private-sector use out of its supercomputers to make new investments worthwhile. Drug discovery and automotive design are two applicable areas. And, of course, there's artificial intelligence. With IBM planning to field its Watson supercomputer against quiz master Alex Trebek on Jeopardy! later this year (video below), Japan will be playing catch-up again. After all, who's going to build brains for all those Japanese robots?

Robotic dummies for rent

I've written before about the elegant mannequin robots designed by Tatsuya Matsui and his studio Flower Robotics. Matsui has just announced that he is offering these curious machines for rent, to the tune of $3,000 apiece for four days. Not cheap, but chump change to some haute couture dealers.

Matsui's Palette mannequin, above, has limited artificial intelligence. Its 16 joints allows it to strike a pose in response to people around it. I was struck by its quiet grace.

Matsui wants to turn Palette into a product by renting them to stores and event organizers. "We want to prove that (humanoid robots) can be commercially viable with this mannequin robot," the Nikkei reported the architect and product designer as saying.

For more on Matsui, read my Japan Times article here.

Via Nikkei Net

Giant sci-fi robot under construction

"Check before and after fight." It's great when giant combat robots come with practical warnings like that. But why aren't they in Japanese?

The project to build a giant Gundam robot is afoot in Tokyo. The 11-meter, 35-ton RX-78-2 robot being erected in Shiokaze Park in the Odaiba area marks the 30th anniversary of the $500 million "Mobile Suit Gundam" science fiction franchise. It's going to send out mist and beams of light once complete July 11. And then go on a rampage across Japan.

Here are some pics from the Mainichi.

Is Japanese technology past its prime?

Japanese electronics makers are hemorrhaging red ink. Overseas competition (Samsung and LG) is intensifying, the domestic labor pool is shrinking and consumption is limp. Are Japan's glory days as a technological powerhouse over?

That's the question posed by this insightful article by David McNeill in The Independent quoting yours truly. Yes, it's amazing to see how much Sony, whose first product was a rice cooker that didn't work, is struggling amid these tough times.

The article highlights the fact that Japan is essentially a hardware-oriented culture. It's no surprise that the Internet was not created in Japan, and that the most recent popular electronics that make use of it are not Japanese. Are Japanese manufacturers destined to fade away due to the old cliche that Japanese lack "groundbreaking creativity"?

I don't think so. Japan is a very creative, imaginative society, as anyone who's studied it to any extent can attest. There are many factors that limit the spread of successful, innovative Japanese products, some social or structural and others economic. Besides, the products that are gaining market share may not have a Japanese brand on the outside, but often have Japanese technology on the inside, as McNeill notes:

Toshiba, for example, manufacturers the mini hard drive that powers the iPod, Japanese companies monopolize the production of semiconductor-grade silicon, and make much of the optical fiber and laser diodes that form the backbone of the internet; Nikon and Canon supply many of the optical machines that print lines on computer chips, and so on.

I think the death of Japanese manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.