Japan has a growing number of elderly in need of nursing care and an urgent need for new approaches used to assist care-giving personnel. Researchers at RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries (TRI) are developing a robot which performs one of the most exhausting tasks for such personnel – lifting a patient from a futon at ... »
Researchers from the Hasegawa Group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology are developing a robot capable to think, learn and take on tasks it hasn’t tried before. By using Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN), the robot can think in a way similar to humans, because it can make educated guesses and decisions based on its ... »
Unlike the heliotropic technology from MIT which uses difference in temperature to turn the photovoltaic panels in the right direction, a group of researchers from Japan developed moving mirrors that follow the sun throughout the day. The developers from Smart Solar International claim that devices can generate twice the electricity compared to other currently available ... »
After the 9.0 earthquake and the devastating tsunami that struck off the coast of Honshu Island, the cooling systems of three reactor units at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant became severely damaged. Although Japan is well known for their share in robot development, there are no robots built to deal with nuclear disasters and ... »
PaPeRo (Partner-type-Personal-Robot) – a personal robot from NEC Corporation – has been developed since 1997. It is being developed to interact with people and provide them with more information or entertain them. Due to increasing number of elderly people living alone, the folks from NEC conducted a research where they programmed PaPeRo to provide them ... »
Even before the wider usage of touch-screen devices, there was a need for scratch-proof glass materials which protect the screens of our favorite gadgets. The folks from Asahi Glass Company (AGC), Japan’s largest glass maker, announced they will launch worldwide sales of Dragontrail – a glass material that is highly receptive to chemical strengthening, to ... »
Most of the today’s popular music artists use technology to add effects or adjust their singing in order to make it more interesting to new generations of listeners. A program called Vocaloid can synthesize singing of male or female voices which have been used for choruses and it has been around since 2004. One of ... »
