West Japan Railway Company to Deploy "Gundam-Style" Railway Robot

TapTechNews July 5th news, Hasegawa Kazuaki, the president of West Japan Railway Company, said that the company will start to widely promote and deploy the "Gundam-style" railway robot this month, which is mainly designed to trim branches on the railway tracks, fix and spray paint the metal frame of the cables above the train, etc.

The company started testing the "Gundam-style" railway robot 2 years ago, which is basically a crane with a robot torso connected at the end of the arm.

The robot has a small head like WALL-E (the protagonist in the movie Wall-E), several large camera eyes and two huge articulated arms with clips at both ends. It can reach up to 40 feet in the air and can carry up to 88 pounds, and can also use a brush or a chainsaw.

Workers need to control the robot through VR headsets and motion controllers that provide force feedback. TapTechNews attached the video from 2 years ago as follows:

The West Japan Railway Company hopes that by deploying this robot, on the one hand, it can reduce accidents of workers falling from heights and avoid electric shock incidents, and on the other hand, Japan currently has a shortage of labor, and the population over 65 years old accounts for 29% of the total population, ranking second in the world.