Videos: Toyota’s amazing violin-playing robot

Toyota has never been known as an auto maker that’s really active in the robotics area (as opposed to Honda, for example), at least when it comes to producing robots with high show value. There are two exceptions though: one is Winglet, the Segway-like robotic vehicle Toyota showed in 2008, and the other is a violin-playing humanoid that made its debut back in 2007.

Toyota has been hiding away that humanoid for the last three years but decided to take the wraps off of it for the Shanghai Expo that’s currently taking place. It’s performing daily in the Japanese Pavilion.

And as you can see in the video embedded below, the 1.52m tall and 56kg heavy robot is just awesome (sorry for the bad image quality):

Here’s another clip (it’s shorter but in slightly better quality) I’ve grabbed from a Chinese video site:
http://blip.tv/play/hMQ5gd6hZwI%2Em4v

Via Plastic Pals