Japanese Baby Robot Teaches Parenting Skills

What giggles when you shake a rattle, cries when you tickle it too much, and stares directly into your soul with a pair of luminous blue eyes? It's Yotaro, a Japanese robot programmed to be just as cranky as a real baby. Yotaro's creators hope the robot will teach young people the joys of parenthood and that the gigantic head made of soft translucent silicon and backlit by a projector won't be too terrifying to look at late at night. "Yotaro is a robot with which you can experience physical contact just like with a real baby and reproduce the same feelings," said Hiroki Kunimura of Tsukuba University's robotics and behavioral sciences lab north of Tokyo.