While the crime rates in Japan are not that high, there are some crimes that happen in suburban Japan. The incidents taking place around unused land are particularly hard to track, due to the lack of…

posted by  Tanuki | 9 years, 4 months ago | 1 comment

Humans can pick up soft or small objects with ease, but that is not the case for robots, which have difficulty replicating the delicate movements of the human hand. When they do not know how strong a…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 4 months ago | 2 comments

Are banana peels really slippery?

Is it possible to extract vanilla fragrance from cow dung?

The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded for study into these kinds of amusing topics. Since 1991, the US publisher I…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 4 months ago | 1 comment

Construction sites in Japan are enjoying a wave of automation amid an increasing shortage of laborers, with the introduction of robots to do heavy lifting and drones that instantly collect aerial dat…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 4 months ago | 2 comments

Japan, perhaps more than any nation on Earth, has a deep history with autonomous drones. Its companies have been using them for decades to assist with agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and cons…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 4 months ago | 1 comment

Suppose that tennis superstar Kei Nishikori serves to you in virtual reality, or a 3-D image of Mashu Baker, a Rio Olympic gold medalist in judo, appears like magic on a stage and powers into action.…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 4 months ago | 1 comment

Inside a modest-looking office building in Tokyo lives an unusually clever industrial robot made by the Japanese company Fanuc. Give the robot a task, like picking widgets out of one box and putting …

posted by  Yubi | 9 years, 4 months ago | 3 comments

Messaging app Line is set to make a big push into AI, later this year rolling out a Siri-esque voice assistant and an Amazon Alexa-style smart speaker, the Japanese company announced yesterday at Mob…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 4 months ago | 1 comment

NHK has learned that a group of Japanese researchers has for the first time drawn up ethical guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence.

The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, compr…

posted by  Yubi | 9 years, 4 months ago | 0 comments

Science hasn’t quite progressed to the point where we can view large-scale mechas pummeling each other in a special colosseum...but we do have the next best thing! Misumi Group, a robot manufacturing…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 9 years, 5 months ago | 1 comment