For years, Japanese researchers have tried to build a humanoid robot, and they are getting surprisingly close. If you are curious about Japan's broader robot culture, you can also take a look at our article on mecha in Japan. Here, though, we are sticking to real androids.
We will focus only on androids, robots with human-like appearances. The videos below show how they were presented and how speech and movement have evolved over time.
By the way, the female form of a robot is usually called a gynoid.
A robot for training dentists!
Showa University created Showa Hanako to help dental graduates train for their profession.
Talking robots
It was a major advance in 2010 when talking robots were presented, although with a huge limitation. The video shows a bit of the presentation; you need English or Japanese to understand it properly.
Robot that imitates movements
Report and interview with two robots
Asuna
Asuna is a robot with more human-like movements, presented in 2014 and 2015, and it marked a major step forward in robotics. Although it is still not fully realistic and sometimes even a little unsettling, the videos make it clear how naturally it can answer questions.
In the dialogue, a Japanese speaker asks her name, she replies and even states her age. When the speaker says, 18 years? she confirms it with "juugosai Dayo". That really stood out to me.
She was also presented at a fair in February 2015 in a slightly different version.
We can see that her appearance resembles a persocom from the anime Chobits.
Robot that sings and dances
The female robot HRP-4C shown in the videos below can sing and dance.
In this way, the Vocaloids start to feel almost alive.
These were some videos I found to give an idea of how far android development has come in Japan. What do you think? Will it still take a while before they build a more human-like robot?
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