The knee-high robots wobble like frantic toddlers toward the finish line, jamming into walls, tripping over metal feet, tirelessly picking themselves up -- only to topple again.

There's laughter, and applause. But what's most prevalent at this automatonic scramble for the finish line nearly 20 feet away is the crowd's love for robots.

The Manoi AT01, from Kyosho Corp., comes in a $1,270 kit of tiny motors, plastic parts, wiring and lots of screws, which require a whole day of mind-numbing, hair-tearing assembly that leaves your wrists sore.

I had already put the robot together with hands-on help from the company. And so I jumped at the opportunity when I was invited to take part in a race for Manoi, short for "humanoid," with members of the Japanese press.

___

FIERCE COMPETITION

The idea sounds fun. The organizers were serious.

They booked the fashionable Omotesando Hills complex in downtown Tokyo. Robots wearing Santa outfits played Christmas carols at the opening ceremony.

Trophies were readied. Electronic sensors attached to the robots' feet calculated the time at the finish line to fractions of a second. And we all got backstage rooms to rev up our robots.

The journalists also got technical support. My reliable helper was Yuta Sugiura, a 20-year-old university student and robot expert, whose robots don't come in a kit, and instead compete in Japan's professional robot league.

Using a remote device on my computer, I could control various movements such as walking, turning, backing up and getting up.

The winner? A robot entered by Kondo Kagaku Co., which makes the motors -- the joints and muscles. With souped-up joints and muscles, it zipped through the race in 11 seconds, the clear winner.

The best time I got out of four tries for my robot was about 40 seconds. Once, I ran past the two minutes we were allotted and had to give up.

___

DROID, INTERRUPTED

Click here for video!

Making things worse was my utter inexperience with controlling robots. I couldn't remember which buttons did what.

I had my poor robot walking totally in the wrong direction, or pathetically squirming on the floor as it tried to get up off its back when it had fallen on its face.

The whole time, the MC was giving a blow-by-blow account of your fumbles to chuckles from the audience.

___

A BALANCING ACT

The biggest challenge was balancing the robot so that it wouldn't keep falling.

Although that was just a matter of adjusting two numbers in the program -- one for the right foot and the other for the left foot -- it never seemed to come out quite right, no matter how often we adjusted the numbers.

So many factors seemed to matter. To make things worse, the surface of the track wasn't even, and that was bad news for a robot that shuffled more than marched, stumbling to simply get past the tape that marked the starting line.

If we made the robot tilt to the front too much, it would crash forward. If we tried to counter that, it would keep collapsing on its back.

Even when by some accident the robot walked smoothly, it wouldn't do it again the next time we tried using the same settings, and would keep tumbling all over the place.

One trick that worked for some mysterious reason was to make it walk backward -- all the way to the finish line.

____

asap contributor Yuri Kageyama is AP's business writer based in Tokyo.

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.