IGNORING decades of multiple and dire warnings from science fiction, the Japanese consumer electronics giant Sony is planning to construct a thinking robot with the “brain” of a supercomputer.

Its project will fit out the Qrio robot — a silver humanoid about the size of a three-year-old child — with a wireless connection to a grid of 300 high-powered computers. Working as one and generating colossal processing power, the computers will supposedly equip the robot with the so-far elusive ability to use its own judgment in coping with tasks.

Sony’s aim is to create a device with many of the attributes of the star of Will Smith’s latest film, the science fiction thriller I, Robot. In the film, which opens in Britain this weekend, a technophobic policeman investigates a crime that may have been perpetrated by a robot.

Giving a robot the ability to “think”, rather than following instructions, remains the great unconquered area of robotics. Robots can be instructed to cross a room and pick up a particular object, but the processing power required to let it decide how to navigate obstacles is huge. Researchers around the world devote themselves to that quest, and Hollywood delights in scaring us with the idea of free-thinking robots running wild or taking over.

But few show such an obsession with robotics as the Japanese. In the electronics, car and engineering industries, almost every big corporation has a robot division tucked away in the depths of its research department. Prowess in robot construction has become a thinly veiled arms and ego race, particularly among the car companies: Honda and Toyota vie aggressively to outdo one another. At the latest reckoning, Honda’s robot can stroll up and down stairs, while Toyota’s can play the trumpet and swing its hips to the tune. Mitsubishi’s robot uses ultrasound to work its way around obstacles.

And the obsession is introduced very early. The summer holidays produce endless exhibitions and demonstrations aimed at getting Japan’s youth hooked. At the RobotFair 2004, in the Odaiba science park in Tokyo, five-year-old children watch as engineers perform a surgical post-mortem examination on a humanoid robot. Those children already addicted compete in the “Robot Wars” held nationally. Unlike the British contest with the same title, Japanese do not build machines designed to smash their opponents to pieces, but to perform some complex task such as standing a 20ft cardboard tube vertically and balancing a ball on top of it.

Companies and universities are equally fierce in their robot rivalries. Vstone, a tiny firm in the industrial heartland of Osaka, last week began sales of Robovie-V, which stands 40cm tall and sells for just under £5,000. Robovie-V’s chief selling point, besides being able to walk on two legs and dance, is its victory in the football competition at the 2004 World RoboCup in Lisbon. The millions of yen poured into robotics research in Japan are justified in many ways. The favourite tactic is to present robots as the answer to the country’s demographic timebomb — a phenomenon that produces a large number of elderly Japanese and too few young to care for them. Fujio Cho, Toyota’s president, said: “We want to meet a variety of society’s needs by developing highly practical robots.”

The Japan Robot Industry Association predicts that the size of the robot market will be eight trillion yen (£40 billion) by the year 2025, of which half will derive from robots designed to help the elderly. Already on sale is ifbot, a product of Business Design Laboratory built by the industrial giant Futaba for the nursing home market. It is capable of handling tens of thousands of types of conversations with the lonely. Japan’s largest security firm, Secom, is developing a guard robot to patrol outside houses and pursue intruders at about 6mph.

Japan’s domination of robotics is certain, but still raises the question of why so much effort has gone into making the machines look human. Vast budgets are diverted into projects animating facial expressions, hands and other body parts, and all because of one immutable statistic: survey after survey shows most Japanese want their robots to look human. Shigeki Sugano, a Waseda University robotics professor, believes that the answer may lie in ancient religion. “In parts of the world where there is Confucianism, there is a stronger preference for humanoid robots,” he said. “Japanese find it easier to be sympathetic to something that appears, at least on the surface, to have a soul.”

METAL MARVELS

• Leonardo da Vinci designed the first humanoid robot in 1495. His drawings show a mechanical knight apparently able to wave its arms and move its head
• Grey Walter devised the first electronic autonomous robots at Bristol University in 1948. His three-wheeled robots could make their way to a recharging station when low on battery power
• George Devol and Joseph Engelberger invented the first industrial robot in 1956. In 1961 it joined the assembly line at General Motors
• Nasa’s Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover explored 250 sq m on the surface of Mars in 1997 Source: Robot Hall of Fame

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