A Japanese inventor has created a robot that can play soccer, albeit not very well.
Hajime 33 is a weird looking machine, standing over six feet tall but weighing in at a mere 44lbs, with a least a couple of pounds of that being eyebrow. What’s notable about the battery-operated, remote controlled giant, created by Japanese inventor Hajime Sakamoto, is that he can walk around and kick a ball.
As you can see from the video, Hajime 33 isn’t the most accomplished soccer player in the world, and it’s going to be a long time before the Robo-Soccer World Cup is on TV, but bipedal robots are notoriously tricky to make work, so building one that can stand on one foot and kick a ball, as well as walk and bow, is actually quite significant.
Sakamoto says that he will apply what he’s learnt from this project, as well as the other robots he has built, to making a full-sized, working Gundam within the next ten years.
Source: Wired
