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Competition Robots: Empathy and Identification

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Japanese Robot Culture

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Abstract

Extending discussion of hobbyist participation in robot culture in Japan, this chapter looks into humanoid competitions. These competitions are organised events for purpose-built, small-scale hobby robots: they sprint, play soccer, or fight each other. Focusing on the fighting robot format, this chapter discusses these robots as important intermediaries, facilitating a reflexive anthropomorphism in which participants project themselves into their robots. Through an examination of a comedy contest for robots that is designed to entertain the audience with laughter, the chapter also examines the intersection of humour, robotics, and spectacle. As this comedy robot contest shows, humour can successfully facilitate the audience’s imaginative capacity to accommodate something imperfect, strange, or unfamiliar, such as a humanoid robot.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Yuji Sone

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  1. Yuji Sone
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Sone, Y. (2017). Competition Robots: Empathy and Identification. In: Japanese Robot Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52527-7_7

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