In July, Team OSAKA won an international competition called Robot Soccer World Cup, held in Lisbon.

VisiON, its 40-centimeter-tall autonomic robot can kick or throw a ball, and even make judgments, with no outside control, through the use of a 360-degree vision sensor.

Osaka will host the next RoboCup, which will provide a good opportunity to publicize the potential of the local robot technology (RT) industry.

With 13,000 factories in Osaka Prefecture, and research institutes and universities, Osaka believes it is one step ahead of other cities in regard to the RT industry and its goal is to create a center of RT research and a robot showcase.

This center, to be called “RoboCity: Center of RT Experiments”, will be a testing ground for robot safety. Visitors will be able to view the latest technology and newest robots as well as tell researchers what robots they would like to see.

Asada said people were already familiar with Sony’s Asimo and other robots created by major firms, but small and medium-sized manufacturers were more suited for creating robots because consumers will want robots to perform specific functions. Robots, therefore, will be specialized, so they cannot be mass-produced.

According to Daily Yomiuri online, scenes such as an elderly woman talking to arobot in front of a restaurant in Osaka is nothing uncommon. Ifbot, a 45-centimeter-tall robot, woke from sleep mode and gave her a wink.
Ifbot’s Sensibility Technology means it is able to detect the emotions of its interlocutor from the tone of voice and the words used. It can also produce more than 40 facial expressions, recognise 10 people, has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words and adapts its conversation to the habits and personalities of different people.

The robot is also targeted at the elderly, for whom having someone to talk is essential to their well-being.

In an underground area of Umeda, one of Osaka’s shopping districts, Robovie-R (more pictures), another communication robot, hugged small children and called them by name, during a two-day demonstration in mid-July, while Robovie-M, a small humanoid robot, skillfully threw and kicked a ball (comes in kit and costs around US 4,500 doll.)

It may still look like science-fiction to some of us, but life with robots is gradually becoming a reality.