Gundam | A 25-ton Robot in Japan can move its arms and legs

Japanese engineers have made a giant Gundam in Yokohama. The whole area looks like a rocket launch station. However, instead of a rocket, there’s a massive Gundam robot. For the nerds out there, yes this is the Gundam Model number RX-78F00. The giant robot is roughly 59 feet tall and has been made to scale. It weighs a massive 25 tons. 

While making it to scale makes it seem pretty cool, this Gundam also moves (somewhat) like the real deal. Excluding the 18 flexible knuckles on its hands, the gigantic robot has 24 moving joints.

This beast of a bot appears to be the world’s largest bipedal walking robot, and has become an iconic fixture along the Yokohama skyline. Fans began touring the exhibit, which includes an on-site museum and cafe, on December 19 last year.

But there is dissent among faculty from some of the most prominent robotics departments in the U.S. about whether it qualifies as a walking robot at all. Because this Gundam appears to use a supporting structure to help it move, they consider it to be a kinetic sculpture, or an art installation that relies on motion to create some affect in the viewer.

Gundam Factory Yokohama, the organization that built the robot, did not return multiple interview requests for this story.

Roboticists believe that it would be nothing short of an engineering marvel for a robot of this size to really walk, run, and wreak havoc; the laws of physics would be pushed to their logical extremes. Specifically, scaling rules would dictate a whole slew of changes to the actuators (or motors) that allow the Gundam to raise its legs and take strides.

By scaling rules, it means that if you make something bigger, then different aspects of it get bigger or smaller in different ways.

Scaling rules are not just the stuff of robotics. Moore’s law predicts that the number of transistors in a silicone computer chip will double every two years as the technology advances. Allometry, the biological study of the scaling relationship between the size of a body part and the size of the entire body, describes why ants can haul roughly 100 times their weight and humans can’t.