Puny humans, bow before your robot masters.
Via BoingBoing:
Here’s video of a beautiful tabletop "Transformer" robot that reconfigures itself from a car into a walking humanoid. The robot, called WR-07, was built by Nakamura-san at Himeji Soft Works in Japan. Link to Robots Dream page with video, to YouTube page with video.
Mitsubishi’s Wakamaru is one of the robots most commonly seen in the press here (that attention-hog Asimo aside, of course), so it was no surprise to see this story about him standing guard outside an elementary school in Tokyo.
The experiment uses IC cards to allow Wakamaru to i.d. anyone wishing to enter the school, although the ‘bot has little enforcement jurisdiction beyond alerting staff. Interesting though.
OctopusDropKick:
NTT Communications and Tmsuk have begun testing the RFID-guided shopping assistant robots at a shoping mall in Fukuoka. The robots read RFID tags embedded in the floor to get information about their location . They also carry your shopping bags and provide related sales information when they arrive at their destination.
Images of the shopping-bots here.
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