For this foray, I’ve had a look around the robotics hobby shop “Robot Kingdom” (ツクモロボット王国), run by very reasonable Akiba PC chain Tsukumo, on the 3rd floor of their “パソコン本店” flagship PC department store. I’ve always been very interested in robotics, and Japan is the world leader in this field; not only that, it even has a vibrant hobby robotics scene. So checking out the robot hobby shops in Akihabara is naturally something I have been keen to get around to, and post about.
The basic pattern for Japanese hobby robotics at the moment is buying, assembling, customising and programming these gnome sized bipedal robots, though there are many variations, and you are quite free to make superior quadrupedal and hexapodal designs, or whatever original design you have the ability to implement.
You can customise them in a variety of ways, in sort of a cross between upgrading your PC (in this case adding better servos, sensors and so forth) and decking out your ride (with custom bodywork, etc.).
It is of course possible to buy pre-assembled units for a premium, if you have not the time or patience for it all.
Many of the models are not really robots (as in possessing autonomously operating capabilities) per se, being mere remote control marionettes, but some do have sensors – the focus is still more on pre-programmed dancing robots than ones capable of usefully responding to their environment. Give it time. An open source AI scene could really work wonders here – AI programming really does not seem as accessible as assembling the actual bots.
You can buy separate shells for many of the more popular models, which mostly entails emulating the look of certain giant robot suits which seem so popular with the Japanese. I can’t help wondering at the possibility of Bandai licensing their designs here? Or specifically creating suit designs able to fit on these kinds of bots, or their slimmer successors? Or how about actually putting together Gundam robot kits? Marketing possibilities aplenty.
Masamune Shirow and Armored Core fans, rejoice! This little quad model is my favourite by far – functional insectoid designs trump excessive anthropomorphism where I’m concerned.
You may have noticed by this point that this is an expensive (but very cool) hobby. Anything less than ¥100,000 is probably just a shell or set of servos.
You can at least afford to buy something when you go in the shop. They also have consumer toy robots like Pleo, and other smaller bots.
I have no idea what this little aberration is supposed to be.
Hideous. I prefer the Gundam aesthetic, but hopefully soon something functional will shape tastes towards a less plastic finish; Tachikoma anyone?
This is one of the most unassuming and uncharismatic (apart from the Hello Kitty robot) items in the shop, but in certain respects represents a technology at the very van of the robotics revolution, and with profound economic repercussions. As you can see, it is a straightforward (and probably rather low-end) robotic carving device, able to take data from CAD software and render it in whatever physical medium the machine can work with.
The profound repercussions I mentioned are not just hyperbole – imagine being able to download the schematics for a crucial part or machine normally manufactured expensively in a large factory, and have a 3d printer in your garage knock one out whenever you need one, whether in a polymer or resin, or eventually in steel or titanium; this would have rather dramatic implications for the economic structure of manufacturing, and shift it more towards being a knowledge industry where production is simply a question of CAD design rather than the industrial organisation of large facilities.
I hope this has been of interest, and I will endeavour to visit the other main Akiba robot hobby shop and post about it shortly, so I will have more on this front soon.
They’ve actually had those machines available for a little while now, but on the manufacturer end. Although they aren’t CAD, they use full 3-D renderings with compatible machines to produce figures and such. Japanese companies are trying it out, I think there was an article on Heisei Democracy not too long ago if I’m not mistaken, and in america they use the same sort of machines at a company called Figureprints to produce individualized figures for people that play World of Warcraft, based on their characters in the game.
I think it will be very interesting to see what happens to the market as the price comes down to allow sophisticated fabrication at a low price; if it created a market for manufacturing as CAD services rather than physical provision of goods, it could have some fascinating implications.