Standing 8.46 m (27 ft 9 in) tall, 4.27 m (14 ft) long and 4 m (13 ft 1 in) wide, two-legged robot weighing in at more than 7 tons, Sakakibara Kikai’s beast named MONONOFU (meaning “samurai warrior” in Japanese) holds a Guinness World Records title for the largest humanoid robot vehicle.
Mononofu became larger than the door to the warehouse. This means that it can’t go outside without them either dismantling it or the building itself.
Developed by engineer Masaaki Nagumo from Sakakibara Kikai, a maker of farming machinery based in Gunma Prefecture, Japan This humanoid looking beast can move its fingers and turn its upper body, and walk forward and backward, thus setting the new world record for being the Largest humanoid robot (largest humanoid vehicle), according to the WORLD RECORD ACADEMY.
It’s movement was eerily smooth, as if it had wheels on the bottom. However, its knees appeared to be moving as if it were walking.
Nagumo later explained that Mononofu does have wheels but isn’t driven by them. Rather it uses its pelvis and knees to move forward and backward along the wheels.
You might have wondered why a robotics company was based way out in the sticks of Gunma. Well that’s because Sakakibara is actually a farm machinery company creating equipment such as feeding machines and automatic soil aeration.
However, the agriculture business as we know it has been on the decline for quite some time, so Sakakibara decided to diversify into amusement machines, utilizing their know-how of safety and ease of use that goes into their farming equipment.
Sakakibara Kikai has developed other robots and amusement machines alongside its main agriculture equipment business and rents them out for about ¥100,000 ($930) an hour, for kids’ birthday parties and other entertainment.
The company has created robots as varied as the 3.4-meter tall Landwalker, the smaller Kid’s Walker Cyclops and the MechBoxer boxing machine — but the mighty Mononofu towers over them all and executes more complex movements.
MONONOFU is designed to resemble robots from various Japanese animation such as GUNDAM, and features a cockpit from which you can control all movements. It even has a lift that takes the pilot up to the cockpit from the ground! According to Masaaki, the company’s initial plan was for something slightly shorter.
“We were thinking of around five to six metres. But because we wanted a cockpit, that height will not be enough,” he explained.
Here’s is an interview with one of the developers
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