Robina

There's been quite a frenzy lately about Toyota's venture into robotics. Well, the fanfare continued today when Toyota officially showed off it's receptionist robot, TPR-Robina. Waziwazi would love to make trips to Japan to bring you live coverage of such robot launches. But seeing as our current budget can only afford us a trip to the local Los Angeles supaa to buy some edamame and Pocky, we hope you don't mind if we just translate Impress Watch's coverage of the event:

• ROBina stands for "ROBot as INtelligent Assistant"
• Height: 1.2m (3.93'), Weight: 60kg (132lb)
• Max speed: 3.6km/hr (2.24mph)
• Robina has laser, ultrasonic, power (arm) sensors, a microphone for speech recognition, image recognition and wireless LAN
• 27 degrees of freedom
• Videos: Robina making an entrance and signing an autograph

Toyota announced today a tour guide robot (with a cool hair-do) that will show visitors around its exhibition hall in Toyota City. There's not much detail about the robot named Robina, but the press release says the wheeled robot can communicate with visitors verbally and using gestures. It can also recognize the visitors' nametags and engage in coversation with them as well as sign autographs with its jointed fingers (which, ahem, we said was coming). Finally it's capable of autonomous navigation. Toyota hopes to monitor the robot and apply what it learns to developing future robots.

While robots like these are a show of a company's technological prowess, Toyota is developing the robots to assist with domestic chores, nursing and medical care, manufacturing and personal transport.