It looks like an evil robot from an ’80s sci-fi movie, but West Japan Railway’s new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more than a bit of painting and gardening in mind.
Starting this month, the machine with a rough head and eyes shaped like a Coke bottle, mounted on a truck that can drive on rails, will be used for maintenance work on the company’s network.
The driver sits in a cockpit on the truck and ‘looks’ through the eyes of the robot via cameras. He also operates the powerful limbs and hands remotely.
With a vertical reach of 12 meters, the machine can lift objects weighing up to 40 kilograms, hold a brush for painting or use a chainsaw with the help of various attachments on the arms.
For now, the robot will focus primarily on pruning tree branches along the tracks and painting metal frames from which cables hang above the trains, the company said.
The company says the technology will help fill the labor shortage in aging Japan and reduce accidents such as falls from heights or electric shocks.
“In the future, we hope to use machines for all kinds of maintenance work on our infrastructure,” the company’s president Kazuaki Hasegawa said at a recent press conference. “This should be an example of how we can deal with the labor shortage.”
