Chainsaw-wielding robots prove they can contribute to human mobility in ways other than people running away from them in terror.
Japan’s rail network is famous for its sterling safety and reliability records, and neither of those would be achievable without a whole lot of preventive maintenance. East Japan Railway Company (a.k.a. JR East), one of the nation’s largest rail operators, is constantly monitoring the condition of its tracks and carriages in order to spot potential problems before they occur, and when it spots an issue that needs to be addressed, it dispatches a crew to take care of it.
And sometimes some of the members of those crews are chainsaw-wielding robots.
JR East’s maintenance division had noticed that tree branches growing over the tracks near Nobeyama Station in Nagano Prefecture needed to be cut and cleared away, in order to keep them out of the way of trains traveling on this section of the Koumi line. To do so, they rolled out one of their new multifunction heavy railway machines, a humanoid robot attached to a vehicle capable of traveling on rails like a train or on streets like a truck. The robot’s left hand is a multi-pronged claw, suited for grabbing and moving branches and other debris, but where things get really awesome is the right hand, which is a chainsaw.
The robots appear to be updated versions of the units JR West started using in 2024. JR East began adding the robots seen in the above videos to its maintenance fleet in March of this year, but there have only been limited opportunities for the public to see them. The company has traditionally tried to schedule its maintenance projects for the middle of the night, so that they can be completed in the time between the last train of the night and the first of the morning, so as not to disrupt service for passengers. An increasing number of maintenance workers have been requesting day shifts, though, and the company is looking to accommodate them, which also affects the robots’ usage, since the machines are human-operated.
Online reactions to the JR East robot’s day at Nobeyama have included:
“All of a sudden, we’ve got the kind of awesome robots I’ve always dreamed about.”
“Yes! It’s so cool how the left and right arms are different.”
“Total R-O-B-O-T vibes.”
“It reminds me of the robot from [Studio Ghibli’s] Laputa.”
“Is this the robot that the T-800 Terminator is gonna get developed from?”
“So should we call this a ‘labor,’ like they call the mecha in the Patlabor anime?”
“Hey, didn’t I see that thing in Contra: Hard Corps’ train stage?”
“It’s a robot, but it’s also kind of cute.”
JR East says that shifting a greater number of maintenance projects to daylight hours will necessitate more frequent closures of line during their regular operating hours, but hopes that passengers will be understanding, and acceptance will most likely be easier to accept if they come with the promise of more chances to see robots in action.
Source: Teleasa News via Yahoo! Japan News, Yahoo! Japan News/Nagano Hoso, YouTube/ANNnewsCH
Top image: JR East
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