Swinging robot video

Someone's been programming a KHR-series robot kit to swing, demonstrating how practical they can be!

Puppy love, redux

Another robot dog will hit store shelves in Japan in October following the demise of Sony's popular Aibo last year. Sega Toys has announced it will market Mio, a small toy robot dog that can express its "emotions" and respond to petting. It has sensors on its head, chin and back. Mio's eyes will display over a hundred icons to express psychological states. It can also respond to voice with its own "babble," play music and shuffle along. There's a video here.

Retailing for 9,240 yen ($75), Mio is part of Sega Toys' "Dream Pet" line of robotic animals that includes Yume Neko Smile, a lifelike synthetic cat.

Bank on it

From an HSBC ad at Narita Airport outside Tokyo. It was the last thing I saw in Japan before a recent trip stateside where I spoke at the National Academy of Science along with astronaut Mamoru Mori and robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi. HSBC, which calls itself "the world's local bank," clearly knows the Japanese market - many baby boomers would be struck by a natsukashii (nostalgic) feeling when seeing tin toys from the fifties and sixties like this one.

Robot antiques roadshow

On the road in rural Japan recently, I spotted this guy amid some old teacups and lamps at a very curious antiques shop in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture. Some of these older toy robots from the fifties and sixties can fetch tens of thousands of yen, or a lot more, in Japan.

The shop is called Sanyo-do and it's worth checking out if you're in Kurashiki, famed for its old warehouses along the canal. Not only does Sanyo-do inexplicably have dozens of porcelain HMV dogs on its roof (the terrier listening to the gramophone), its upper floor houses an amazing piggy bank museum -- which happens to include a piggy bank in the shape of a robot welding arm!

Perfect for budding little industrialists.