National Project on Advanced Robot Technology in Japan

In modern society, there are an increasing number of hazardous jobs which could not be performed without safety measures and in places which could not be accessed directly. In order to cope with these situations, it is necessary to develop automated or robotic systems which could carry out hazardous operations in place of human beings. In this context, the National Project on Advanced Robot Technology had been promoted under the framework of the Large-scale Project supervised by AIST, MITI since 1983. At the final stage prototype robots were assembled and demonstrated for a nuclear plant robot and an undersea robot respectively. Good results were obtained from the demonstrations.<>