The robot took six years to develop and come from the Mobile Sun Gundam series. The impressive robot boasts an arm-cannon that can fire sponge balls at high speeds. (Image via Sakakibara)
Have you ever dreamed of piloting a gargantuan robot? Who hasn’t. A robotics manufacturer in Japan may have just made that possible. The company, Sakakibara designs machines focused on agriculture purposes and build life-sized robots that are completely operational by people.
Masaaki Nagumo, one of the companies most talented engineers, built the world's largest and functional robot - it stands at 28 feet (5 meters) and weighs 7.7 tons and has been named LW Mononofu. The effort took him 6 years to build up the robot (2011-2017), and it was inspired by the cult-anime series, Mobile Sun Gundam. It has the capability of being able to move its arms and legs, walk forward and fire sponge balls from its arm-mounted air cannon. The only way to pilot the robot is to climb inside the cockpit where it has monitors installed to see what's going on outside the robot.
The arm cannon is also capable of firing its sponge balls at high speeds of 87 mph (140 kmh), but it's not specifically designed for combat use, especially in some competitions like the giant robot battles that take place once a year. The main focus and intention of designing these massive robots are to help and encourage fans of giant robots to live out their dreams of manning one, one day.
Nagumo has also built other robots that separate themselves from this giant spectacle. He has an impressive collection of robots - especially one that greatly resembles the ED-209 robot seen from the famous Robocop movie. He uses that robot to rent out to children's parties for 100,000 yen ($930) per hour - which is pretty expensive, but the machines are rather impressive.
The giant robot, Mononofu can only walk very slowly at the speed of 0.6 mph (1 kmh) so efforts to try to pilot it out of Japan may be quite difficult to achieve.
The robot's creator has an impressive height and can move around via human piloting inside the cockpit.
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