Meet METHOD-2: A Large Manned Robot from South Korea
So I was just sitting down to write another article about Bigfoot or something when I glanced over at South Korea and – well, you should really see what they’ve got going on over there.
Hankook Mirae Technology has reportedly designed a giant robot that mimics the movements of its human pilot, who sits in a cockpit located right in the center of the robot’s body. It’s not unlike the style of mechs we’ve seen in James Cameron’s Avatar or any number of GUNDAM– and/or Zord-related media.
The robot, known as METHOD-2, stands four meters tall (or about 13 feet), and according to company chairman Yang Jin-Ho, it’s the “world’s first manned bipedal robot.” The above video shows off one of its tests.
Watch as it follows the arm motions of its pilot and walks forward. Very slowly.
Vitaly Bulgarov, an SFX expert who worked on 2014’s Robocop and Terminator Genisys, also helped design METHOD-2. He shared videos of it on his Instagram and on Facebook, revealing that the project “required developing and enhancing a lot of technologies along the way.”
He said this “opens up many real world applications where everything we have been learning so far…can be applied to solve real world problems.”
He also mentioned that, if you were close, you could feel the ground shake as the giant robot moved.
Anyway, according to Phys.org, while it may look like a super fighting robot on the outside, METHOD-2 is apparently intended for testing only, at least for now. But who knows what the future holds?
It should also be noted that LiveScience isn’t convinced the robot is real. Very curious, indeed, but for now I’m going to go with it.
