Western culture has a long history of distrusting robots as space companions mostly stemming from 1968’s famous 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the ship’s artificial intelligence HAL 9000 attempts to kill off all of the members on board because they will jeopardise its mission. Japan on the other hand is robot obsessed, with Manga regularly featuring humans and robots being friends and companions. It makes sense then that Japan Space Agency will be sending a robot capable of recognising human facial emotions and body language, and responding in kind as a guest of the first Japanese commander of the International Space Station. Kirobo is a joint venture between Dentsu, Toyota and the University of Tokyo and will be the first robot to have a conversation in space with a human. We certainly hope it goes better for them than the crew of 2001.

Remember to turn on captions for the video below to get English subtitles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SqMRGqnisGM