4/23/2008

Today I spotted this elephantine e’pissoir cleaning robot for urinals that was demonstrated at the Kobe International Airport.
Don’t you think the little yellow hat on top of this “labor-saving” 100kg (220lb) robot is precious?
The following is my mega-funky machine translation of the Robot.Watch’s description of the demonstration of the the robot.

---

The “DCBA” men’s room cleaning robot
Robot.Watch, Impress.co.jp 2008 April 22 (edited translation)—On April 17, 2008, MERTEC Company unveiled a urinal cleaning robot, the “DCBA” in Kobe Airport terminal….
…Mr. Susumu Kanai was in charge of the design of the DCBA. He said that, ” I imaged a powerful reversal of the urinal drain would be like an elephant and used this as the theme. Following that reversal theme, the robot’s brand name “DCBA” [pronounced "DaSuBiEh"] is the reversal of the letters “ABCD.”
Mr. Mr. Kanai explained, “To express performing things in sequence in Japanese is commonly referred to as doing something “ABC” — I thought it would be a good idea for the logo to be the mirror reversal of ABCD….

---

Ok, it is hard to imagine how shoving and wrestling the 100kg DCBA robot into position would be a savings in labor. In the top photo, the DCBA robot dwarfs the operator girl. However, the company claims the machine cleans one urinal in 10 seconds and saves eight liters of water in the process. The robots are intended for the cleaning operations of large institutions including highway rest areas and public restrooms of railroads. The selling price will be 1 million yen (about $9,700 USD).

UPDATE!
There are scant details available yet, but I hear there is already prototype robot–pictured below–that is designed to challenge the “reversal” concept of the DCBA robot. That is, this robot cleans the source needing cleaning rather that urinal (ha, ha).