Kawada Industries has developed the HRP-3 Promet Mk-II, the newest robot in their Humanoid Robotics Project. Here’s what Pink Tentacle has written about the bot:

The HRP-3 Promet Mk-II, a blue-collar android tough enough to trudge through heavy rains, carry out disaster relief operations and work in environments hazardous to humans, demonstrated its blue-collar skills at a June 21 press conference at Kawada Industries headquarters in Tochigi prefecture. In addition to flaunting its ability to walk on slippery surfaces, the robot showed off its electric screwdriver wielding talents by taking the opportunity to tighten up some loose screws.

There are short video clips of the robot in action on this page, but I’ve spliced them together to make one long clip, which you can see here:

Wondering why this robot looks pretty cool? It’s probably because it was designed by Yutaka Izubuchi, who worked on designs for mecha in the Gundam and Patlabor anime series!

Update: There is now a story about this robot on Yahoo! News:

“Our country is rapidly ageing and it is an urgent task to develop robots that can perform tasks only done by humans now,” the statement said.

“If a humanoid can substitute human functions, the entire social cost would be reduced,” it said.

Kawada Industries said the company hoped eventually to put the HRP-3 Promet Mk-II to commercial use.

Project manager Takakatsu Isozumi said the company wanted to target clients such as construction contractors by 2010, with each robot costing around 15 million yen (120,000 dollars) each.

“We want to increase the actions that this robot can do at construction sites, such as driving construction vehicles,” he said.

Update 2: Here’s a video of the older HRP-2 model: