International Robot Exhibition 2009 held in Tokyo

Robots of all shapes and sizes were on display at the International Robot Exhibition 2009 in Tokyo on Wednesday. While the main focus of the exhibition was industrial robots, they were also joined by transformer robots. Reminiscent of a Transformer, the Omni Zero 1000 can walk and turn itself into a car and roll along the floor.Originally made for Robot One, a robot competition held twice a year, the robot can also transform itself into various shapes. When in walking mode, the robot can open its head section to reveal a seat and carry a human occupant or more often its creator Takeshi Maeda. It has wheels on its shoulders, and it can turn into a car shape and move that way. Also, a human, in this case me, can sit on this section and it can walk. Those are the two main traits, Maeda explained to Reuters after riding on the Omni Zero. Another mechanism getting media's attention is a robotic arm by Toyota Industries, which can be controlled by a flick of the wrist.Using a combination of sensor and high-framerate cameras, the system determines the exact location of a user's hand and what the user's hand is doing by referencing hand shapes from a stored database.Though the current system is still limited to grabbing a ball, the developers have high hopes that the system could be used in places where a computer mouse and keyboard can't. The biggest merit of this is being able to control objects without having to hold anything. When in the field or when working where your hands have to be high up, you can't use a mouse, and so we hope to use it in those sort of contexts, Kazuo Seiki of Toyota Industries Robotic Office told Reuters at the exhibition. Many industrial robots not only showed how they could improve industrial productivity, but also special skills such as dancing in coordination with green lightsaber-like tubes that would make George Lucas proud. The annual exhibition has been held in Japan since 1973 with nearly 200 companies from around the world participating at this year's exhibition. Japan expects its future robotics market to expand to $10 billion U.S. dollars within the next decade.