In Japan, popular robots include humanoid entertainment robots, androids, animal robots, social robots, guard robots, and many more. Japan employs over a quarter of a million industrial robot workers. Robotics revenue by 2025 is expected to reach $70 billion.  The country pioneers into incorporating the robotic industry with the everyday lives.

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The characteristics and competitive advantages of Japanese robotics are the superior movement and mobility of the robots.  The recently created CB² (child robot with biomimetic body) can follow moving objects with its eyes.  It acts increasingly human with time.  One of the newer Japanese robots, HRP-4C, is a female robot programmed to catwalk. It walks, talks and moves its legs and arms, with the help of 30 motors.  Its facial expressions are driven by 8 facial motors: it can smile, blink, pout and express anger or surprise. 

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Nowadays, many scientists begin to go beyond from the science fiction to break through the technological possibility developed from artificial intelligence.  According to Sim (2011),  AI forms a powerfully attractive motor for the artificial evolution of human reality into science fiction; on the other, it is a research programme attracting funds from military and corporate sponsors that seeks, for the first time, to place a new created or manufactured species of intelligent life on the Earth.  AI, along with artificial life which focuses on the evolution, replication, swarming behaviour and adaptation, forms a haunting cultural threshold beyond which Frankenstein’s monster already has us in his virtual grasp (232).

 

Works cited:

“Japanese robotics.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Mar. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_robotics.

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Sim, Stuart. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism [electronic Resource]. 3rd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. Routledge Companions. Web.

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“Japan’s Awesome Robots.” YouTube, uploaded by NeoScribe, 12 Oct 2018,  www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3GMGkFZFzI.

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Images: 

Wikimedia Foundation. "Asimo Honda". ibid.

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McCurry, Justin. “Hiroshi Ishiguro, with Erica, his latest humanoid robot” and “Sonny, from I, Robot.” Found, The Guardian, 31 Dec 2015, www.theguardian.com/ technology/2015/dec/31/erica-the-most-beautiful-and-intelligent-android-ever-leads-japans-robot-revolution.