Last Saturday was the the long-waited finals of Bacarobo 2008, the “Stupid Robot” championship that made a name for itself last year.
Organized by Yoshimoto Kogyo and hosted by comedian Yama-chan, Bacarobo pit six ambitious (and arguably not stupid) creators of idiotic robots to amuse us all.
The qualifying rules are pretty sparse, but aside from some minor size requirements, the robots must be mechanical, useless to society, and and make people laugh. The problem, of course, is that for every stupid robot there’s someone who thinks quite the opposite, but this year’s entries were pretty stupid (despite having complicated innards/backends at times).
The winner (in the center) was YKRN, an “Idol Robot” that used facial scanning technology and leaned in to faces it liked. To be fair, it seems like there’s some sophisticated technology behind it, and the creators from Tokyo University had the geek credentials to prove it.
My personal favorite was the “Jointed Samurai Robot” that could detect lies of the wearer by being wired into his vitals. Seems he has a thing for schoolgirls! It was nice to see a foreign entry as well with a couple of “Perverted joke-telling” robots by a Swedish creator and his language algorithm.
A team of high school girls made a cute robot group that, frankly, I never quite understood fully, but for some reason the manner of the girl feeding the pig is hilarious.
Be sure to check out the video below and, if you have a stupid idea for a stupid robot, start getting ready for next year!
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