Japanese baby-like robot created to stimulate birth rate

March 11, 2010 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

Yotaro, a Japanese robot resembling a baby, was created with the hope that it will teach parenting skills and encourage Japanese people to have more babies.

A Japanese robotics team hopes that Yotaro, a robot that is programmed to mimic the behavior of human babies, will increase interest in having more babies.

Created in Tsukuba University’s robotics and behavioral sciences lab, “Yotaro could help young parents to learn about raising a baby,” research team member Masatada Muramoto told the AFP.

Yotaro simulates many of the functions of a real toddler including a runny nose, touch sensitivity, emotional response and actions like sneezing and sleeping. Yotaro can even cry, releasing drop of warm water from the eyes. The same water-release system is tied to the nose to simulate the symptoms of a cold.

“Yotaro is a robot with which you can experience physical contact just like with a real baby and reproduce the same feelings,” said Hiroki Kunimura, a member of the development team.

“We came up with the idea of a baby robot because we wanted to reproduce a human being’s warmth and skin color.”

“We decided on an infant that has not yet learnt to talk because the feelings generated towards a newborn will be the same for everyone, and because interaction is less complicated than if we had made it talk.”

The face of Yotaro is somewhat strange to the Westerner, replete with oversized cheeks, huge cranium and almost alien blue luminescent eyes. However, the developers don’t believe that the strange look of Yotaro will deter Japanese from using it, especially given the exposure the country’s people have had to robots in its culture.

“Japanese have always been comfortable with robots who are not seen as threats but as beings that have the potential to develop friendly relationships,” Muramoto told the AFP.

The researchers at Tsukuba hope that robots like Yotaro will increase the number of babies conceived in the country. Japan is facing issues of an increasingly old population with few babies being born to revitalize the next generation of people.

Nearly a fifth of the Japanese population is older than 65, and government estimates suggest that nearly 40 percent of the population could fall in that category by 2050. The problem is compounded by a United Nations estimate that Japan’s birth rate is a mere 8.3 births per 1000 people, well below the worldwide average of 20.3 births per 1000.

Yet Yotaro is not the only baby-sized robot intended to encourage a flagging birth rate in Japan. Last week the University of Osaka announced the M3-Neony, a baby-sized robot designed to crawl like a human baby. M3-Neony is designed to learn how to utilize its motors and sensors to push up and crawl.

You can watch a YouTube video of Yotaro in action by going here.