Manoi AT01 fully assembled. View Slideshow 
TOKYO -- It came in an unmarked box -- and in many, many parts. As I leafed through the assembly schematics, an inch thick and in Japanese, I got that sinking feeling. But, oh, what I wouldn't do to ingratiate myself with our future robot overlords.
One of them, in embryonic form, lay scattered across the table, a seemingly infinite sea of small servomotors, wires and polycarbonate body shells. It was the latest humanoid robot kit to hit the market in Japan, dubbed Manoi AT01, and although my assembly skills reached a plateau at the Ikea furniture level, I desperately wanted to join the robot revolution in Japan.
It seems like everyone is buying little bipedal kit robots here these days to play with at home or enter in robot sport competitions like footraces. "The future is on your side" is the slogan of Manoi's maker Kyosho. Attempting the assembly made me feel good inside.
The kit maker touts its $1,200 programmable toy as a "one-fifth-scale athlete humanoid" that kids as young as 14 can put together. This became a source of embarrassment for me as I fumbled along with the manual. I was told it would take someone with general hobby robot competence about nine hours to assemble the droid; I stopped counting at 24.
I spent the bulk of it screwing small, identical-looking parts into one another (there are 489 individual parts in the kit, including screws), and screwing up the bigger picture -- invariably discovering a knee was bending the wrong way or an arm assembly was put together wrong. There were eight different kinds of screw; I relied on three screwdrivers and needle-nose pliers.
The toughest part, though, was cutting out the polycarbonate shells, which are shipped straight out of the molds, to form a kind of screw-on robot body armor. Freeing the complex 3-D shapes from the hard, jagged plastic risked slicing a wrist or finger (I learned to invest in curved modeling scissors). But I couldn't make excuses. The robots of the future would never forgive me if I gave up.
Eventually, the random-looking collection of black plastic began getting anthropomorphic. A pair of arms took shape, then legs and finally a torso. With the last of the 17 servomotors affixed as a head, I completed the delicate task of wiring each motor to the pins on the chest-mounted control board, like nerves leading from the muscles to the brain. Now all I needed was a hunchback assistant and a lightning storm.
I set the rechargeable battery in Manoi's back, and flipped the power switch. In true Frankenstein fashion, it instantly whipped its head to one side and flung its arms out to the side, like a Borg getting phasered. But it was alive! By connecting it to my PC with USB cable, I could control each of the servomotors in a 260-degree range with the bundled software.
After each joint is set to form a standing position like a toy soldier at attention, Manoi can remember this "home position" and use it as a starting point for downloadable motions like running, dancing, getting up and squatting. Handlers can create their own motions and maneuver Manoi with a remote control sold separately.
But I still had to spray-paint the polycarbonate armor and screw it onto the body mounts.
Once it had a face, I really began to empathize with him -- even changing pronouns without realizing it, and thinking of him as not just complex clockwork, but a plastic person, someone with a personality and a mind of his own. He has an eternally peeved expression, as though miffed over his birth. The finished product might look like the love child of Robocop and an Imperial storm trooper, but I love him to bits.
"Manoi's design is intended to make it easier to feel close to and have mass appeal for everyday household environments," says Kyosho's Jun Sato, whose colleagues took pity on me and helped me soothe the beast within.
Instead of flailing his arms, Manoi now disco dances. No, he can't vacuum the tatami mats or do anything useful. But he made me realize how difficult it is to get a machine to do complex things we take for granted, like walking. I found a new appreciation for bipedal wonders like Honda's Asimo.
But aside from the satisfaction of building and programming him, Manoi also brought out the parent in me like no battery-operated device ever could. I've taken endless photos, and confess that I've dressed him up in scarves and sweaters made for dogs (he's Chihuahua size).
Standing in a corner of my Tokyo apartment, his unblinking stare gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I can rest easy now, knowing that when our collective time is up, my plastic son will put in a good word for me.
