Robots can be weak, too

Tatsuya Matsui is an architect and designer with a passion for robots. His studio Flower Robotics has produced some striking automatons like Posy, a cute little wedding flower girl. Others include a black-clad humanoid clown. His robots are cute but also a little scary.

Matsui's robot aesthetic is partly based on the notion that robots can share weakness and fragility with human beings, and that will endear them to us. That's why he thinks flowers are a metaphor for robots. Cyberdyne Systems this ain't.

He has also created a mannequin robot called Palette that can can swing its arms gracefully to enhance the appeal of clothing placed on it. Palette has already modeled designs by Hanae Mori and Louis Vuitton in Tokyo. Palette is also equipped with a vision sensor so it can mimic the gestures of passersby. The exhibition, at Mito Art Tower in Ibaraki Prefecture through Jan. 27, offered visitors iPods displaying what Palette sees (photo, below).

Matsui has also worked on Pino, a cute little robot used as a humanoid research platform, and SIG, a head used for robot hearing research at Kyoto University. I wrote an article on the latter for Scientific American that's archived here.

Tatsuya seems more concerned with robot design than functionality, but his Flower Robotics is only in its infancy. Meanwhile, he's been designing airliners and swanky buildings in Ginza. Matsui is quite a Renaissance Man.

There's more on the Tatsuya Matsui Flower Robotics exhibition in my Japan Times article here.