A Humanoid Robot With Lifelike Bones And Muscles

We see a lot of robots here, including some that mimic human movement. But this one gets a special prize for having the most muscles--or the robot equivalent, pulley-like contraptions--of any robot based on a natural creature. The final muscle tally for the University of Tokyo's Kenshiro robot is 160, with 50 in the legs, 76 in the trunk, 12 in the shoulder, and 22 in the neck. And it also has a slightly unnerving pair of tennis shoes.

The 'bot is 158 centimeters tall and weighs 50 kilograms, which makes it about the size of a 12-year-old Japanese boy, complete with an aluminum bone-structure. It's accurately human, too: the individual bones and muscles are placed where they would be in a real person, and its limbs are proportional to the weight of a human's.

This video only shows the individual limbs, but put Kenshiro back together and team it up with this robot dad we recently saw, and you've got a biologically accurate robo-family.

[IEEE Spectrum]