Japanese robot to strut ‘her’ stuff on the catwalk

JAPANESE researchers yesterday showed off a robot that will mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models as she struts her stuff down a Tokyo catwalk.

The girlie-faced humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and a shoulder length hairstyle, boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic human movement.

“Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C,” said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.

The fashion-bot is 158cm (5’2”) tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43kg (6st 10lb) — including batteries. The robot’s facial features are inspired by the Japanese manga comic-book style.

“If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny,” said one of the inventors, Shuji Kajita.

“We have deliberately leaned toward an anime (Japanese animation) style.”

The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment.

Hamming it up for the cameras, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly from journalists.

The performance fell short of flawless when she occasionally mixed up her facial expressions — a mistake the inventors put down to a case of the nerves as a hail of camera shutters confused her sound recognition sensors.

The preview was a warm-up for her appearance at a Tokyo fashion show on March 23.

Like her real-life counterparts, robot model HRP-5C commands a hefty price — developing her was said to cost more than 200 million yen (€156m).