ISSEI KATO / Reuters
It’s a scene seemingly ripped out of a sci-fi cartoon: A man crawls into a massive robotic suit and begins controlling it from the inside using joysticks. However, one Tokyo-based company is showing the world that this technology is very much real—and it might one day be used to explore the moon and Mars.
Japanese robotics company Tsubame Industries recently unveiled the 3.5 ton, 15-foot tall robot dubbed Archax (named after the winged dinosaur archaeopteryx) that can be piloted from the inside by a human. The suit was modeled after the battle bots from the popular anime “Mobile Suit Gundam,” though its creators say that it’ll be used less for epic battles and more for saving lives and as a tool for space exploration.
“Japan is very good at animation, games, robots, and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one,” Ryo Yoshida, the CEO of Tsubame, told Reuters.