Yes, But Can You Build It for Less Than 1M Yen?

Sure can; and PopSci sure did. Remember our All-Seeing Tank project (November 2007 issue)? Well, Sanyo has uniquely stumbled onto the same concept—remote-controlled home foundation inspection tanks. In our iteration, for less than two hundred bucks, we showed you how to convert an RC tank into a dirt-grubbing, IR-seeing, home-crawl-space runabout. Sanyo’s incarnation of a similar product features an IR camera, obstacle-avoidance software, and a custom mapping application for driving your tank through subterranean spaces, but sports a sobering price tag of ¥1,000,000 (roughly $8,736 USD). Sanyo calls their beast, “Yuka shita Inspection Robot.” Great minds must think alike. —Dave Prochnow

(Image: Sanyo)