CATDOLL: Japan's strongest commemorative project was born to make 1:1 Gundam move in five years

Japan's Gundam animation has been launched for 36 years and is still very popular in Japan. In 2014, when the Gundam animation series celebrated its 35th anniversary, the official announced a plan that has never been seen before and will never be seen again. That is, Sunrise and Bandai are soliciting proposals from all over the world to make the 18-meter-tall life-size original Gundam that now stands in Odaiba truly move in the real world in 2019. On October 26, the first selection of this seemingly crazy plan ended, and the proposals of 4 scholars from Japan and overseas passed the selection. This Gundam launch plan, which can be called Japan's Apollo plan, seems to be really going to be realized in 2019.

The full name of the project is "Gundam Global Challenge", with the goal of making the 1/1 original Gundam in Odaiba truly move in 2019, the 40th anniversary of the Gundam series animation. This project is divided into a part that makes Gundam move in reality, and a part that makes Gundam start in the virtual world. The first selection of plans this time is mainly to select plans for real start. Sotsu's president, Kenhiko Aoki, said at the selection meeting that this project has received strong responses from both Japan and abroad, and the ratio of plan submissions in Japan and abroad is about 3:1. In response to this, Gundam's father Yoshiyuki Tomino also said: "I hate people who want to make fantasy things a reality, but if the fictional setting really becomes a reality, I also want to see Gundam start in the real world."

Finally, the proposals of Yuya Kaneko, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Information Science at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Mingxun (transliteration), an associate professor at the National Taiwan University, Yoshimitsu Kihara, president of Robofuture, and Satoshi Okada of the Information Systems Engineering Laboratory at the University of Tokyo passed the first selection. These four proposals all challenged and tried to solve the problem of upright robots walking on two legs. The technical supervisor of the project said, "The real difficulty starts from here. We need to overcome many technical difficulties to make Gundam really able to walk on two legs." According to the schedule, the final design plan will be finalized in 2018, and then the actual construction phase will be entered. Finally, the goal of starting Gundam to walk will be completed in 2019. The planner hopes that the next selection will be more groundbreaking.