We’ve been in love with Team Skeletonics’ human-powered exoskeleton for years, and all throughout, it’s pretty much been the same mechanical and aesthetic configuration. But it now looks like they’ve been refining in the background, and might be bringing something new out to play.
Japan’s NHK has developed a subtly robotic virtual reality interface (that actually virtualizes the non-real), and Honda has released 100 of it’s subtly robotic assistive devices into Japanese medical institutions; Subtle robotics moves, exciting robotics potential.
When a giant Japanese company that makes robots starts collaborating with a giant Japanese company that makes houses at the same time the Japanese government begins funding public robotics, awesomeness seems likely to follow.
Japan’s going to be running out of people, and apparently a lot of the kids these days just don’t wanna, you know, do it. So, naturally – robots, yo.
This piece is not a memorial, but hopefully a brief insight into how a terrible natural disaster has invigorated Japan’s robotics industry and brought to light a problem affecting all industrialized societies.
Japan’s got the best robot exoskeletons, and the best among them is Cyberdyne’s HAL. But there’s a new Power Loader in town, and HAL better stay on it’s game – which is also presented here as a wildly generalizing analogy for Japan’s floppy electronics industry.
Considerably deeper than Gee Whiz Techno-Fetishism or Alarmist Technological Conservatism, Al-Jazeera correspondants and producers are probably providing the most unbiased and uneditorialized WarBot coverage out there.