Talking Robots: Haruhisa Kurokawa

Posted 3 Aug 2007 at 08:54 UTC by mwaibel

Watch transformers reconfigure in the recent Transformers movie (or try doing it yourself), and you may be excused to think that there is no way real robots will ever do the same. However, Haruhisa Kurokawa, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan, has been developing such robots since the late 80s. Up to now only mentioned as a side-note in a previous article, the MTRAN (Modular TRANsformer) robots are now on to version 3 and have taken the lead in the race for reconfigurability, beating out contestants like ATRON, or Zykov and Lipson's self-reproducing machines. As Kurokawa admits himself, it is hard to convey a sense of these robots with mere words. But if you take a look at these videos it is clear that he is on to something. For more details, check out the Talking Robots interview out today.