Robot Exhibit

Have you ever wondered if the future many kids dream of is here? If the hover boards and flying cars made up in Back to the Future: Part 2, is really somewhere out there being approved? What if the future is here? What if right now there is an alien talking to the president? You never know. The world is a gigantic place, and so is the universe. All I know is that’s exactly how I felt last Saturday.



We drove and drove to a billion Lawsons, Family Marts, and even a CoCo. These are all convenience stores by the way. They have these red boxes where you can get (no, not movies) tickets for whatever event you. If you buy from those boxes instead of the actual event, you get a discount. We were trying to get a discount but of all the convenience stores we drove to, not a single one had any tickets for a robot exhibit. My dad had read about this exhibit in one of the newspapers on Kadena Air Base. He really wanted to take us. So, he ended up buying tickets at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum of Art. Long name, eh?


Walking in, we saw a whole bunch of life-sized replicas of famous robot characters from famous movies. One you might recognize, (if you’re like me and just love action movies) is The Terminator. That thing scared the heepitapajeebees out of me! If it were moving I would have ran out of that building.


As we continued walking around, we saw a bunch of little toys, action figures and posters of things like Astro Boy, Starwars, Transformers, and Alien. Plus, there were many more Japanese characters we didn’t know. It was truly robot heaven!


Once we got past all the still robots, we got to some real, live, moving ones. The first one we saw was a climbing robot. It was a silver-ish color that looked like aluminum foil. The next robot we saw was a little baby dinosaur called a Pleo. You can actually buy it. I knew a friend who had that one. The Pleo is a very life-like robot. Its movements are almost like a real animal. It even has “skin” on it to cover up all its wires and medal parts.


Next we saw some remote wired cars. Kemet got to drive one on a short obstacle course. Once Kemet hopped out of that super cool car, we then headed over to check out some robot floor cleaners! They were circular and had little bristles underneath them that sweep up all the dirt off of the floor. There was a floor sample to demonstrate the cleaning performance of the robots.


Finally, my FAVORITE robot was the ones that could play traditional musical instruments! There were three robots playing a traditional Okinawan song. This song must have been popular, because everyone was clapping and bobbing their heads to it! All and all this robot exhibit was the Bom!

Here is a short slide show for this entry:  https://picasaweb.google.com/vincentprice74/August102011#slideshow/5639016823074559698