The scene felt like Tokyo's Shinjuku Station on a busy weekend afternoon - musicians banged out tired songs on out-of-tune instruments, one odd-looking gentleman obsessively brewed a pot of tea, and a scraggly salaryman chain-smoked cigarettes. But these weren't the daily denizens of a crowded train terminal. The menagerie of characters gathered Saturday morning inside Tokyo's Tepia technology center were not human but robots.
This was the seventh annual "Street Performer" robot contest in Tokyo, presented in conjunction with Stanford University's US-Japan Technology Management Center. Thirteen teams of students from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and several other Japanese universities demonstrated a motley array of robots judged for creativity, technology, design, and entertainment value.
"Before the students can design, they need to understand design problems," said professor Shigeo Hirose of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, whose Mechano-Aerospace Engineering students were behind most of the entries. "Designing a complicated machine like a robot is a great introduction."
Early on, the audience was treated to a dance by the Charlie Chaplin robot. The 4-foot-high automaton shimmied from side to side, spinning his cane and working his eyebrows, until a snag in the carpet caused him to drop flat. Several giggling students rushed out to set their mechanical companion back on his feet, or rather wheels. Moments later, the Chaplin bot stumbled again, causing his hat to fly into the air. Applause rang out.
Another favorite was the bellows-equipped smoking robot. As the machine puffed, Mark Pauline, director of the US robotic performance group Survival Research Laboratories, in Tokyo for a demonstration of his work, wryly commented that "in the politically correct US it would be completely unacceptable for students to build a smoking robot."
But as also demonstrated by a crowd-pleasing shell-game robot, almost anything goes in Hirose's class.
"I don't want the students to make conventional machines," Hirose said during a brief intermission in the two-hour contest. "As Japanese, I expect them to be creative."
If that was the aim, the contest was an overwhelming success. Scotch-tape and posterboard hid complicated servos and gears controlled by personal computers. What these robots lacked in durability, they made up for in style.
"This is certainly an interesting educational approach to have the students come up with their own solutions to real-world problems," said Richard Dasher, director of the US-Japan Technology Management Center. "But there's definitely a trade-off between flashiness and detailed technical merit."
Shortly after intermission, all eyes were on a large mechanical frog that croaked as it gulped down soap bubbles produced by a machine disguised as a tiny house. Moments later, gurgling sounds were heard coming from the automated amphibian and a giant bubble was released from its rear end. The crowd of several hundred friends and children laughed wildly.
"I appreciate the unique Japanese sensibility in that frog robot," one American judge deadpanned into his microphone.
While the frog was honored for its creativity, the big winner of the day was a xylophone-playing monkey robot named Mokkine.
The grinning students proudly pumped their professor's hands and accepted their prizes of Stanford-emblazoned clothing. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered and cameras flashed as the Mokkine plunked away at an encore of "The Entertainer." In perfect time, of course.
