Kuratas Mech

Recently there’s a hype over a Japanese robot called Kuratas Mech which is built by Suidobashi Heavy Industry, an organization which aims to spread human ride robots. (The website is not available at the time of writing this post due to capacity issues, I guess we have millions of robotics fans!).  The Facebook Page of this company is glittering and looks really cool. This robot is coming to Wonder Festival 2012 summer.

I suppose that this image was taken during that exhibition.

This movie shows a brief about Kuratas.

Kogoro Kurata, the artist, built robot’s body, and it met good collaboration with Wataru Yoshizaki who built next-generation robot’s OS. First in the world (maybe), the human ride robot KURATAS is now out!! The KURATAS robot supposedly stands about 4,000 mm tall and about 3,000 mm wide with an overall length of 4,000 mm. The great metal beast claims to weigh in at 4500 kg, and can even be controlled remotely via an iPhone. The controls look easy-to-use and seem realistic. You’ll note on the left arm there are twin multi-barreled cannons. How scary would it be as a soldier on about film to have one of these massive robots come walking up? The video claims the top speed of the bot, which has a torso and two arms but rolls on wheels, is 10 km/h. The bot uses a diesel engine and can be driven in high or low modes. The missile launcher appears to be packed with water bottles and will “from time to time” hit its target.

The video goes over how to ride a robot called the Kuratas. The 13-foot-tall wheeled robot is clearly a nod at the Mechwarrior series of video games and any number of Japanese animated shows. In the video, you can see petite Japanese woman climbing into the chest cockpit cavity of the robot and going over the controls, including a remote smartphone-operated mode. Although the first realization of these kind of robots that I saw was in the Matrix Revolutions movie, during defending the last city on earth:

Please note that after World War II, Japan is banned from producing any military weapons so I guess this should be for other purposes because to my observation, they are really law obedient citizens.

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Sources: 1, 2,