Drinks at Asimo Cafe

I went to Honda's Tokyo showroom and had the pleasure of being served drinks by its humanoid robot Asimo.

Guests sit at tables in the office lobby equipped with touch-panel displays. There are two Asimos standing by at their charging stations. When they receive an order, they whir to life and bustle about like human waiters.

I selected green tea. Asimo carried out the order flawlessly - receiving a drinks tray from a human staffer, carrying to my table and depositing it, then bowing courteously and moving off. Other guests bowed to Asimo in return.

Perhaps the coolest thing was that it was largely business as usual at the office. Executives were coming and going, receptionists were greeting visitors and not too many people took much notice in the fact that there were two robots waltzing around the room serving tea and coffee.

Honda has always said it wants Asimo to be part of the everyday environment, and this was its most convincing demo yet.

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.

Rocket punch!

More on the ongoing Great Robot Exhibition in Tokyo: it has lots of cool exhibits like anime super robot Mazinger Z, above. Check out my Wired News photo gallery - I also have an article in the Japan Times about it and the related show Asimo show.

Major robot show opens in Tokyo

Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science has just opened a big show entitled "The Great Robot Exhibition: Karakuri, Anime and the Latest Robots," running through Jan. 27 in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

I attended the press preview and was impressed. The organizers have gathered many of the best Japanese robots out there today, and have extensive displays on the background of robot development such as karakuri clockwork dolls and anime icons like Astro Boy.

If you're in town, "Dai Robotto Haku" is worth catching. It's a great retrospective on Japanese robot culture. Highlights include a wall of one hundred "Master Grade" Gundam plastic models, an original 19th-century karakuri archer doll by Tanaka Hisashige and a new stage show by Honda's Asimo, the premier humanoid robot.

If you can't make the exhibition, you might want to buy Loving the Machine instead!

Dancing bot rocks out in Wired vid

With Tokyo in an intense heat wave, there's nothing like a dancing robot to lift one's spirits from the humid doldrums. This great video from Wired and my roboticist pal Marek Michalowski features the "creature-like" robot Keepon developed at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology's (NICT) Kyoto research center. Developer Hideki Kozima created Keepon as a simple social communication robot with reactive and emotive abilities. Michalowski programmed him. There's more info about Keepon here.

Keepon is also interesting in that he exhibits unpredictable behavior based on sensor input data. Michalowski explained his jig to me thus:

For Keepon, "tempo" is an abstract property that can be perceived in lots of different modalities: sound, vision, accelerometer movement...when he perceives periodic events, he figures out the tempo and synchronizes to that. But his dancing "style" is an emergent property of randomly changing dance "parameters" rather than a scripted set of movements.

Keepon seems right out of Sesame Street or the Muppet Show to me, but this video proves his street cred. I also noticed that it features famous spots in Tokyo such as Tokyo Big Sight, the Kaminarimon Gate of Sensoji Temple, Akihabara's Radio Center Building and Chuo-dori street, Shibuya crossing, and the east side of Shinjuku Station. The final sequence with dancing kit robots like Manoi was filmed at robot retailer and educator RT Corp., also in Akihabara. Wired took liberties with the Tokyo backgrounds, inserting its logo into the visual chaos of neon and concrete.

Super kawaii Keepon rocks. He'll be at the Wired NextFest in LA next month.

Machine mascot for commuter millions

I just picked up the latest rechargeable Tokyo transit card, introduced this week. Aside from being the first universal card that gets you onto buses, trains and subways in the Japanese capital, it's noteworthy for having a robot character. Which is pink, natch.

Pasmo, as it's called, can be used on services run by some 60 transport firms in the Tokyo area, including East Japan Railway. It's a contactless integrated circuit card and can be charged with up to 20,000 yen ($170). It can also be used as e-money at retailers like department store giant Tokyu Corp.

The smart card cost operators 140 billion yen in installation costs for the electronic readers and took fifteen months to work out and test. A simulation involving 1.23 billion transit connections was also performed.

So why a robot mascot? The card-issuing company says robots aren't dull inorganic matter, they represent "kindness toward humans" and "convenience." It adds that normally the Pasmobot itself commutes with the card in its pocket, but when in a rush it "transforms into a bus or train." Naturally.

No old-school symbols of locomotion like the greyhound for the Japanese. It's the machine or bust.

It's a little monster

Brilliant ad inspired by Japanese giant robot/monster classics. It's in a genre with fab videos like Polysics' "Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto" and Beatie Boys' "Intergalactic." Pepto-Bismol even got in on the action.

Makes me want to stomp Tokyo.