Autoblog: Toyota develops violin-playing robot

[monkeyboy]

Filed under: Etc., Toyota

Though Toyota sells a helluva lot more cars around the world than Honda, sometimes we think it suffers from an inferiority complex with its cross town rival. C'mon, in addition to cars, Honda makes jets, motorcycles, generators, lawn mowers and ASIMO, the creepy walking, running, dancing robot that we love to see fall down. Well, Toyota makes robots too, and it's just unveiled one with 17 joints in both of its hands and arms that can play the violin, a demonstration of the dexterity that can now be installed in our future robot overlords. No doubt in fifty years we'll be receiving lashes from robots that use this same technology to tightly grip and swing their whips when we slack off from mining unobtanium in Siberia. We can't wait, thanks a bunch Toyota. Did Terminator 2 teach us nothing?

At the same time, Toyota has also debuted a Mobility Robot that looks like a cross between a wheel chair and a gleaming white porcelain toilet. Its claim to fame is being able to follow a person, travel up 10-degree grades and avoiding obstacles. Sounds like all useful skills in the coming Robot Wars.

[Source: Toyota]
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[Stuart]

Japan is obsessed with robots.
More than half the worlds robot are in one small country.

They are the only country that wants to anthropomorphise(sp?) them, i.e. make them like people. Most other countries want them to fulfil a function like spray a car,to do this they do not need to look like a human.