Its makers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo plan to sell the 158cm fashion-bots for around US$200,000 each.
Thousands of humanoids could be working alongside humans in a decade or so, if that is what society wants, said Fumio Miyazaki, engineering science professor at the Toyonaka Campus of Osaka University.
If the world is ready for a functioning robot secretary, for example, there is “no need for a major technical breakthrough,” he said.
A Tokyo subsidiary of Hello Kitty maker Sanrio, Kokoro — which means heart or mind in Japanese — has also produced advanced talking, life-size humanoids.
“Robots have hearts,” said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota.
“They don’t look human unless we put souls in them,” Yokota said. “When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That’s when we know our work is done.”
Public opinion in Japan may be more open to robots than in the West, where dark science fiction visions from movies such as Bladerunner and Terminator have conjured images of robo-soldiers taking over the world.
Thanks to such benign cartoon characters as Astro Boy, “Japanese people have a friendly image towards robots,” Toshiba’s Yoshimi said.
Asada said Japan’s indigenous animistic belief system may also have readied people to accept human-like robots with minds of their own.
“Everything has a mind — the mind of the lamp, the mind of the chair, the soul of the desk,” he said, pointing at objects in his office.
“Therefore the machines should have their mind too. If we proceed in this study, machines may have something like a human mind or ‘robo-mind’,” he said.
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