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Japan Robotics

Japan Introduces Enormous Humanoid Robot To Maintain Train Lines (theguardian.com) 33

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: It resembles an enormous, malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind. Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck -- which can drive on rails -- will be put to use for maintenance work on the company's network. Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot's eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely. With a vertical reach of 12 metres (40ft), the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as 40kg (88lb), hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw. For now, the robot's primary task will focus on trimming tree branches along rails and painting metal frames that hold cables above trains, the company said. The technology will help fill worker shortages in ageing Japan as well as reduce accidents such as workers falling from high places or suffering electric shocks, the company said.
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Japan Introduces Enormous Humanoid Robot To Maintain Train Lines More

Japan Introduces Enormous Humanoid Robot To Maintain Train Lines

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  • Vs. AI (Score:3)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @05:27PM (#64603911)

    This is far more capable of replacing humans than the AI nonsense going around. This is more along the lines of what happened when computers replaced calculators and their operators.

    • Why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @06:21PM (#64604021)
      Go to Google and search for a business insider article about automation. It'll link off to a study that shows 70% of the middle class jobs in the last 40 years were lost to process improvement in automation.

      Years ago at my job I had the support some VB6 apps. It required a tremendous amount of work every week and it was relatively skilled work to keep the damn thing running. In its Hay Day it was state-of-the-art and all that for the market.

      Eventually the company switched the web-based software. Even added some programming APIs. But with all that it required less support because everything that needed attention was server-side and dirt cheap Indians in data centers did all that support and you didn't even need that many of them.

      There's an old phrase, software is going to eat the world. Folks they don't think really understand what that means. They don't really understand this full scope of what 40 years of non-stop automation has done. There are entire career paths that are just gone.

      In the '90s the clintons and their economists saw this coming. That's why they were always talking about a service sector economy. The problem is service sector economy jobs tend to pay like shit. It's difficult to unionize them and it's easy to break them down into smaller automatable processes for anything sufficiently complex.

      I guess what I'm saying is, we are running out of work and we aren't replacing it with anything. But we're still very much a if you don't work you don't eat kind of people. Something's got to give and I'm not sure what

      • I guess what I'm saying is, we are running out of work and we aren't replacing it with anything. But we're still very much a if you don't work you don't eat kind of people. Something's got to give and I'm not sure what

        Society can continue just fine (private jets and yachts operational, soldiers with full mags) with the lower class starving.

      • "we are running out of work and we aren't replacing it with anything"

        What is different this time as compared to all the previous times when someone said we are running out of work and we did not run out of work?

    • This is far more capable of replacing humans than the AI nonsense going around. This is more along the lines of what happened when computers replaced calculators and their operators.

      We're just about to have an AI revolution in production capacity worldwide.

      The current AI revolution involves prediction from large-scale training on word sequences. It's various levels of "not very good", but clearly has value and can perform a set of simple functions. If you already know what you want to write but don't have the skill at putting words together, ChatGPT is pretty good. You can use it like a sort of an advanced spell-check to amplify your text writing abilities. It's really good at composin

      • The next step will probably be the same technology applied to robotic movements. Instead of predicting the next word or generating a matrix of future word positions (the transformer model), a robot can predict the next movement. All that's needed is a large corpus of situation/movement examples to train on.

        The "motion hallucinations" are going to be downright terrifying. When chat-bots go berserk it is just words.

      • It's really good at composing essays.

        It's really good at composing verbiage. But the stuff it writes isn't generally worth reading. It's this sort of bland, samey mush of words. It's grammatical, and spelled correctly, and coherent, but it coherently makes absolutely no points at all beyond the most surface level stuff.

        The next step will probably be the same technology applied to robotic movements. Instead of predicting the next word or generating a matrix of future word positions (the transformer model), a

        • Oh also going back and doing post corrections because it's never right first time.

          For example, I get a small number of big bubbles when I paint it on these particular walls. High end primer didn't help. Two different high quality trade paints, one applied by a pro didn't help. Its something funny and might be the old paint. The pro solution is to paint, whack the bubbles, sand and repaint those bits.

    • You haven't seen the full plans yet: The giant robots, which are really just mobile suits model RX-78-2, will deploy from the White Base and battle rail line problems. They've already planned the merchandising, kids toys called Gunpla, maybe even a TV series.

  • but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind

    Yeah, right! Iâ(TM)ve seen the movie. I know how this is gonna end! Get your EMP weapons ready; youâ(TM)ll need them!

    • I've got Klaatu on speed dial.

    • but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind

      Yeah, right! Iâ(TM)ve seen the movie. I know how this is gonna end! Get your EMP weapons ready; youâ(TM)ll need them!

      I don't think EMP works on gundams. Gonna need a beam saber or high energy particle cannon to take 'em out.

      • You do like they did in a calamity wars. Hit it hard enough and if there's a squishy person inside you can rattle the insides until they're turned into paste. You don't even need to worry about getting through the nano laminated armor. If it's one of them thar mobile armors though you going to need to do something crazier.

        • Is Iron Blooded Orphans part of the Gundam series, or an offshoot? I am hardly a nerd when it comes to the entire Gundam series, but I thought IBO wasn't part of the canon.

          Regardless, it is my favorite, even with a few plot holes. Can't stand Gundam Wing. Bunch of whiny emo brats. The only good part is when Hiro does his famous, "I will kill you" line. Other than that, he's the worst gundam pilot ever. Fight me.

  • avoids the worst part of giant robots (Score:3)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @05:42PM (#64603939)

    I saw a video of this yesterday, and the best part is how they avoid the worst thing about giant mecha robots: legs. It's like the top half of a mech, with a (stereo!) camera head and arms, welded onto a cherry picker arm.

    painting metal frames

    Now I'm thinking of a mecha Bob Ross with a big fluffy afro, painting happy little trees.

    • the best part is how they avoid the worst thing about giant mecha robots: legs. It's like the top half of a mech

      Yes this looks like a great idea as it's on a solid platform that can move easily to where it's needed, seems like a very useful and practical device.

      You could base something like this on a truck bed and drive it around for lots of work where you had higher things to reach that needed a lot of strength applied, awesome for dealign with large trees where you can imagine the arms could really help t

    • The way most anime handle the silliness of legs is they either ignore it or you've got some sort of brain computer interface and the reason Mecha have legs is so that the pilot can more easily map the machines body to their own brain.

      Even the guy who made Gundam said you couldn't really ever have gundams because gravity would just crush them at their size. That life-size Gundam is actually just a crane with a Gundam shaped box around it. It's still cool as fuck and I wish I could have seen it in person
    • Everything is fine until the upper half of the robot builds itself a lower half and starts rampaging across the country.
  • "Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." -Kyle Reece
  • against the German built Pofalla Transformer [wikipedia.org], a mighty Decepticon made from car wrecks [wikipedia.org], which can destroy rail tracks (and the railroad's reputation) twice as fast as the Japanese robot can maintain them...

  • It resembles an enormous, malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway’s new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind.

    Okay, that sounds really great. I'm feeling very chill about this.

    The 12-metre high machine has coke bottle eyes and a crude Wall-E-like head, as well as large arms that can be fitted with blades

    Wait a minute WHAT'S THAT AGAIN?!

  • Named Johnny Sokko via his wristwatch.

  • Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot's eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely.

    That doesn't sound quite like a robot to me, more like a remote-controlled machine.

  • News is 3 years old! (Score:3)

    by mattr ( 78516 ) <mattr AT telebody DOT com> on Saturday July 06, 2024 @04:04AM (#64604631) Homepage Journal

    Click the below to search for JR (Japan Rail) and robot in Japanese.
    You can see a video of this robot at work in April 2022.
    That said, this is awesome. I knew we would get giant humanoid mechs from Japanese robotics engineers as soon as the tech and money got there. This isn't the first, but it seems likely to be a good testbed for semi-automation of tasks and having no humans messing around with whippy tree branches and electrified overhead lines sounds good to me too. All the slashdotters bemoaning loss of jobs. Sheesh! If it gets cheaper to do railway maintenance you get bullet trains faster!

    https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

    Norimono (Vehicles) news 11/2023
    https://trafficnews.jp/post/12... [trafficnews.jp]

    4/18/2022 - Says JR plans to bring the robot into daily operations in Spring 2024. On time! W00t!!
    https://www.watch.impress.co.j... [impress.co.jp]

  • The beginning of the end

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