Do you recognize this robot?
Remember that Hitachi surveillance robot we checked out a couple of days ago? Well, William Kennedy of MobileRobots in Amherst, NH, took a close look at it and thought he noticed something familiar. No, not the dome, telescoping arm or bright blue body. It was the wheel rims that set him off. According to Kennedy, those gold wheel rims are a dead ringer for rims that were custom made for his company's Pioneer DX bot back in 2002. That bot has been sold in Japan by a company called Revast, which has sold robots to -- you guessed it -- Hitachi. Kennedy thinks that under that dome lurks one of his Pioneer models, purloined and stuffed into a new shell to disguise its true identity. He even created a composite image showing how nicely Pioneer would fit inside Hitachi's bot. So, is this a case of robo-napping? Or just a frustrated inventor with a taste for tacky tires? Unless someone is willing to crack the dome and peer inside, we may never know.
[Via the Raw Feed]
