New robot anime stamps on sale

Japan Post today released its latest edition of stamps featuring robots from popular anime series.

The stamps show characters and robots from manga and anime series Patlabor, which deals with a Tokyo police division that uses huge mecha robots for law enforcement. The mecha feature the designs of Yutaka Izubuchi, who also did the exterior design for the HRP robot series being developed by the government.

JP is issuing 15 million Patlabor stamps in denominations of 80 yen that come in 10-stamp sheets.

The issue is part of JP's Anime Heroes and Heroines series that began five years ago with stamps honoring perennial robot icon Astro Boy.

Others include Gundam, Doraemon and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Karakuri clockwork dolls, the ancestors of modern Japanese robots, have also been celebrated with Japanese stamps.

Check out the Japan Post anime series page here (in Japanese).

New robot ready for dirty work

The latest humanoid robot unveiled in Japan is nice and shiny but wants to get its hands dirty.

The HRP-3 Promet Mark II is designed to work in tunnels, disaster zones and other dangerous environments. Jointly developed by bridge-builder Kawada Industries, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and others, HRP showed off its skills tightening bolts and screwing screws. Check out the funky video here - it also drops the driver with studied nonchalance. But then again it only has three fingers.

Rain- and dust-proof, the latest droid in the HRP series (for Humanoid Robotics Project) stands 160 cm (5'2") tall and weighs 68 kg (150 lbs). Mechanically, it is more sophisticated than the HRP-2, with 12 more degrees of freedom for a total of 42. This reflects improved grasping ability, a skill many humanoids in Japan lack. The robot can also operate autonomously or by remote control. Anime mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi (who worked on Gundam, Patlabor and Macross) did Mark II's exterior.

The developers plan to keep improving the HRP series with an eye to commercialization by 2010 at a cost of $80,000-150,000 per unit. Since the project itself grew out of a national scheme to create robots that could operate in Japan's many nuclear power plants, power utilities could be potential customers.