Robots are capable of doing much more than performing menial tasks such as vacuuming or spot welding car frames. Indeed, some have been launched into space on exploration expeditions while others are capable of performing complex surgeries. Some are on the road to becoming rock stars, like Kenjiro Matsuo’s Z-Machines robotic trio of musicians. The band was ‘assembled’ last year and has been gaining in popularity since then by performing numerous concerts to ever-growing audiences all over Japan. Kenjiro and his team created the robots with the aim of performing music the likes of which could not be achieved by humans. The band is comprised of three robotic members with Mach playing a ‘double’ guitar with no less than 78 fingers playing a wide range of notes, pianist Cosmos plays the keyboard as well as producing a laser-light show from its eyes and Ashura, who drums out fantastic beats using 22 arms. The robotic band has recently teamed-up with UK-based DJ Squarepusher for an upcoming EP entitled ‘Music for Robots’. Kenjiro originally sought help from Squarepusher in creating specialized music for the band, which turned into a five song collaboration that features such memorable tunes as ‘Sad Robot Goes Funny’ and ‘You Endless’. The EP is set to be released on April 8 of this year in North America and a day earlier for the rest of the world. There no word yet if there will be a collaborative tour, however if there is, they could include other robotic acts such as Compressorhead or New Zealand garage-band The Trons.
There is a common misnomer that robots are inherently evil in nature and are nothing but bloodthirsty killers bent on the destruction of the human race. Obviously, this is not true as how could they be bloodthirsty when they cannot convey emotions. Sure, the military employs robots on the battlefield in the form of miniaturized gun-wielding sentry drones, single-armed IED disposal units and DARPA-created pack mules designed to transport heavy loads over adverse terrain but they certainly aren’t bent on the destruction of the human race. Robots that fight one another in a combat ring on the other hand are a very different story when it comes to violence. Don’t worry, toy company TOMY and their miniature Battroborg robots will not hurt humans as they are programmed to engage their own kind in armed battle through remote control by their human counterparts. Think of it like the movie Real Steel but on a much smaller scale and with plastic robots rather than armored behemoths. The tiny Battroborg robots are controlled using a double-fisted IR-based controller, which is used for movement and weapon handling. It is almost like using a Wii controller, performing a punching motion with your left hand results in the robot swinging the weapon in its left arm and the same for the right. This movement also controls the robots direction of travel, meaning repeated punch movements of the left hand results in the robot moving to the left while swinging that arms weapon and vice-versa. To get the robot to travel straight ahead, users alternate punching motions from left to right. Scoring has been changed from the older version of the Battroborgs, instead of getting a series of hits on the robots facemask, users simply try to knock the opposing robot down. The chest area in the robot houses a red and green LED to signify when the robot has been knocked down, which is detected using an onboard g-sensor. The revamped Battroborgs should hit toy shelves in June of this year and retail for $70, which gets you two battle-bots, two controllers and the fighting ring and additional robots can be purchased for $30 as well.
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