Japanese and US Piloted Robots To Brawl For National Pride

jfruh writes: Japan may have just lost the Women's World Cup to the U.S., but the country is hoping for a comeback in another competition: a battle between giant robots. Suidobashi Heavy Industry has agreed to a challenge from Boston-based MegaBots that would involve titanic armored robots developed by each startup, the first of its kind involving piloted machines that are roughly 4 meters tall. "We can't let another country win this," Kogoro Kurata, who is CEO of Suidobashi, said in a video posted to YouTube. "Giant robots are Japanese culture."

Comments

giant machines are US culture, and world culture

[mr_mischief]

In the US we love big machines. The Queen Mary, the Spruce Goose, the continuous asphalt pavers, the Liebherr T 282 B giant dump truck (although Liebherr is a Swiss company), the Boeing 747-400 and Lockheed L-1011 wide-body passenger jets, the massive Abrams tank, the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the 280mm towed howitzer M65 "Atomic Annie", and such are examples.

See how I slipped a Swiss-built monster in there? Well, the US and Japan aren't the only ones. Germany has a 31 million pound excavator. The largest plane is made in Russia by Antonov. South Korea builds some of the biggest cargo ships.

So while, yes, giant robots are a big thing in Japanese art the urge to build huge machines is all over the industrialized world. The US and Germany have never been afraid of large engineering feats. The US has a whole industry of using remotely piloted craft for actual combat.

I don't think Japan needs to focus so much pride on this one little competition as a cultural identity issue. It's not like a US firm is going to enter a contest designing and building a robot with the intent of a face-saving loss or an honorable tie.