Japan introduces enormous humanoid robot to maintain train lines

Lol

...all's right with the world.

It reaches 12m on a telescoped crane, the actual scale of the robot body looks pretty small, smaller than the cab of the truck. Pretty human scale all things considered, makes one wonder if it's goign to be mounted on treads or legs one day for indoor use. It does look very cool indeed.

Perhaps this can serve as just a single leg of a larger combination though

The AV-98 Ingram from the Patlabor anime is 8 m tall, so I wouldn't count this robot out.

Honestly, I thought it would be towering above Docomo Tower.

FPV drone hardware has commercialized very cheap very low latency video feeds to headsets.

Not with headtracking though. Not sure that's reasonably possible.

I wonder if it wouldn't be easier / more comfortable for the worker to just get a low-poly reconstructed 3D rendering of the environment. That way at least they could move their head as much as they want and still get a read-time feed in their goggle without the usual VR tricks.

Responses so far say to optimize neck latency or use a joystick but why not use a 360 camera and handle it in reprojection. First pass could literally be a gopro or insta360 streaming to the headset and you could eventually integrate cameras and do the stitching yourself. The tech already exists and works, and it removes moving parts and actuators

Why not? There's no need for the neck to have more than 1~5 ms of lag, and about 5~10 ms photon lag even with a framebuffer involved (if you align the rolling shutter of the camera to the row-by-row multiplexed display, say OLED @ 240Hz, you should manage 4~5 ms).

> that little bit of lag and judder that turn VR into a vomit machine.

This doesn’t apply to everyone, so it’s just a matter of training people with more tolerance.

just over so it on the cameras so there isn't a latency because you're not actually moving the giant robot head

Patlabor is criminally underrated, in particular Patlabor II by Oshii. Often neglected given how popular his other stuff like GitS is but probably one of the best animated films when it comes to post WWII Japan's military/political questions.

I'm pretty sure they're thinking "giant robots are awesome!"

Weird, sorry about that queryparam I didn't see it there or would have stripped it.

Sounds like they need immigrants.

if the operator gets sick from the latency, even if they see someone they're more likely to have issues though

Good point, the sensor count exponentiates and the optics get a lot more complicated if you want a fully integrated system. Nothing on the market I know of but with where we are on the scaling curves now might be the time to try something like it - you could put together a basic proof of concept with a load of commercial sensor elements and wide angle lenses on a sphere. Eventually you can consolidate the central sensors and lenses into concentric hemispheres. You can reduce the data volume by narrowing the camera angles eventually too

Not sure there’s a market but maybe with VR stereo 360 becomes more valuable, who knows. Technologically doable though

This is more Patlabor than Gundam.