Japan Invents a Robotic Goat and the Internet is Going Gala Over it
Japan’s Kawasaki heavy industries have come up with a robotic goat and It’s awesome!
Remember that golden goat in the Ten Commandments? Well, now it is a robotic goat and people of the 21st century are going crazy over it!
Japan is one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world and there are good reasons to believe that Japan is already living in the future. Now, Japan has a population problem with not enough young people to do the heavy lifting. Considering the aging population of Japan, Kawasaki Heavy Industries created a robot named Bex that looks like a goat and can be used to carry loads and humans can ride them too. The demo video of the Kawasaki Bex shows the robotic goat has a long neck and horns that light up as it moves. It has sidebars and long legs that sprout wheels when lowered.
The Bex robot by Kawasaki Heavy Industries can be used for farming, moving cargo, and more. It has four wheels along with legs. So, you can drive it on smooth roads and also ride it around uneven surfaces like hills, farmlands, etc. “First, we are assuming light payloads such as transporting materials in a construction site. We are currently conducting the development with the target of a 100 kg maximum payload,” said the company.
Other possible use cases could be for conducting inspections where it can be used to patrol around the vast area of a plant and to check the current state of measuring instruments by checking the camera images from a remote location. “Another possible method of use would be for Bex to transport the crops that people have harvested on agricultural land,” the company added. When the robot kneels down and deploys a pair of drive wheels under its belly, it can drive around instead of walking.
The omnidirectional knee wheels and dual center drive wheels also give the robot the ability to perform a tank-steer maneuver or turn in place.
The move toward robots might sound strange, but it’s becoming a common trend in the industry.
Even Tesla has gotten on board with its plans to develop a humanoid robot. Amid an ongoing labor shortage, many companies are looking to replace human labor with robots. Amazon famously uses a fleet of robots in its warehouses, and many restaurants have begun testing out robotic waiters as food delivery workers. US companies ordered around 29,000 robots last year, according to Business Insider.
Kawasaki is of course better known for its motorcycles than its robots, and the company is making progress on electric motorcycle development.
