Japanese catwalk robot unveiled

Japan is great in it's creation of the latest technologies may be they will be the first one to release the different things that will not involve humans in any work that are presently done.
They are maniacs they always invent something.I think the present all the models will be replace by this robots invented by japanese.

The female humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and shoulder-length hair boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.

"Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C," said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.

The fashion-bot is 5ft 2 ins, the average height of young Japanese women, but weighs in at a waiflike 95 pounds (43 kilos) – including batteries.

Appearing before photographers and television crews, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly via bluetooth devices.

The performance fell short of flawless when she occasionally mixed up her facial expressions – a mistake the inventors put down to a case of the nerves as a hail of camera shutters confused her sound recognition sensors.

She has a slightly manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.

"If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny," said one of the inventors, humanoid research leader Shuji Kajita. "We have deliberately leant toward an anime style."

The institute said the robot "has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry" but is not for sale at the moment.

"We unveiled this to attract attention in society," said Junji Ito, a senior official at the institute, who said he saw the HRP-4C as a stepping stone toward creating a humanoid industry.

"It's important that people feel good about humanoids and want to work with them," he said. "We shifted from a dry mechanical image to a very human image."

The preview was a warm-up for the robot's appearance at a Tokyo fashion show on March 23.

Like her real-life counterparts, HRP-4C commands a hefty price – the institute said developing and building her cost more than 200 million yen (£1.4 million).

Hirohisa Hirukawa, another researcher, said the institute hoped to commercialise the humanoid in future.

They are even trying to provide mostly all the human motions to it and I think they will do it so well .It looks so real for the face.And the program of the robot will be available to all the people who buy it so that they can make their own program of it.I think the product may be dangerous .And if it can be programmed to do anything then it can be programmed to kill

Robot Fish to Detect Ocean Pollution

If it looks like a fish and swims like a fish, it usually is a fish. But not this new, lifelike robot fish developed by U.K. scientists.The prototype robot fish, modeled after carp,have been swimming around the London Aquarium as they await their release off northern Spain in 2011.

Equipped with tiny chemical sensors, the fish will collect data on pollution in the port of Gijón and wirelessly transmit the information back to the port's control center.

"It's a little lab onboard the fish," said Rory Doyle, a senior research scientist at BMT Group, the independent engineering company that is coordinating the rollout of the robots with funding from the European Commission. The robots were designed, and are being built, by professor Huosheng Hu and his team at the University of Essex, U.K.

The sensors will detect hazards such as chemical spills and fertilizer runoff and will allow officials to map in real time the sources and impacts of pollution, Doyle said.

He and his colleagues chose a fish design because hundreds of millions of years of evolution have yielded an energy-efficient creature, he said. "Nature has done it very, very well."

But mimicking such a successful design comes at a cost: 20,000 British pounds (nearly 29,000 U.S. dollars) per robot, to be precise.

The roughly seal-size fish, therefore, will be built "robust" enough to handle any eventuality, Doyle said. They can't get caught in nets easily, for instance, and their internal tracking systems can help the robot fish avoid collisions with boats and other obstacles.So far, it also seems unlikely the robot fish will be mistaken for prey: At the London Aquarium, sharks steer clear of the fake fish, possibly because the predators find the robots' electromagnetic fields unpleasant, Doyle said.

At the same time, scientists are working to ensure that the sounds of the robots and other factors don't disrupt the natural environment, he added.