A robot co-developed by Toyota was awarded two Guinness World Records on March 27 for reaching the highest height as a robot from Earth and for being the first robot to have a conversation in space.
The robot, Kirobo, is a joint five-year project between Toyota, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Japanese advertising agency Dentsu, according to Toyota.
Kirobo left Earth aboard a HIIB rocket back on August 4, 2013 for an 18 month stay aboard the International Space Station as a companion for astronaut Koichi Wakata.
"On August 21, 2013, a robot took one small step toward a brighter future for all," Kirobo said 11 days after arriving at IIS.
Weighing approximately 2.2 pounds and standing 13.4 inches tall, Kirobo has a sophisticated system for voice recognition and identifying faces, which makes talking to Wakata easier, according to the Guinness World Records website.
Kirobo is able to stabilize itself under zero-gravity conditions while using a number of pre-set gestures with an on-board voice synthesizing system. One of the main goals of the project was to figure out if a robot could provide psychological support for humans experiencing loneliness, like astronauts on extended stays in space.
Kirobo returned back to Earth last Feburary on SpaceX's CRS-5 Dragon spacecraft, according to Guinness World Records. The cargo ship splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off California and was back in Japan by Mar. 12.
"From up above, the Earth glowed like a blue LED," said Kirobo when returning home.
To mark Kirobo's achievements, Erika Ogawa vice president of Guinness World Records Japan, and official adjudicator Aya McMillan presented official GWR certificates to the team behind Kirobo during an event at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo.
"The project launched five years ago, when nobody believed in human beings and robots co-existing. From that perspective we wanted to send it into space to show that robots and human beings... can go into a new era. It's a sort of symbolic project so people can understand how people can interact with robots."
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