Japanese businesses looking for an employee with tireless enthusiasm and an unrivalled work ethic can now hire robot workers for an hourly wage.
The 113-centimetre-tall bot, called “Ubiko”, can welcome visitors, answer questions and carry objects. The company behind the robot is Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Exchange, which is developing Ubiko with another robotics firm, Tmsuk, based in Kitakyushu, southern Japan.
Following successful tests involving robot receptionists at a hospital in central Japan, Ubiquitous Exchange has decided to make Ubikos available for businesses to hire.
The blue and white robot has large ears and a single large video camera for an eye. It can answer simple verbal inquiries, making it suitable for use as a receptionist or a guide in airports or train stations, its makers suggest.
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Classroom assistant
Henrik Hautop Lund, a robotics researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, says the decision to rent Ubiko out to employers reflects a wider change. “Ubiko is yet another example of how the service robots are becoming available for everyday life,” Lund told New ÒÁÈ˾þÃ.
“There is currently a clear trend in both research and industry to engage in service robot development,” he adds. “And we will see many other examples of service robots in the very near future.”
But Lund adds that Ubiko robot may find little work outside of its native Japan, where consumers ,may be less accepting of robots in general. “It could certainly have a future in Japanese 24-hour stores,” says Lund. “But, for export outside the Japanese home market, Ubiko must be developed further in terms of design and human-robot interaction.”
Wage demands
The robot’s wage demands are also unlikely to impress many prospective employers. Ubiquitous Exchange charges Â¥52,500 ($445) an hour for each robot – hardly competitive compared to human helpers, even in a country with a dwindling population, such as Japan.
The company insists that Ubiko is not overpriced, however. “If we look at these robots as advertising and public relations businesses, the price is quite cheap, actually,” Sakurai says, adding that twenty companies are already on the waiting-list to receive one.
Two other robot assistants, produced by Tmsuk, made their debut last month at Aizu Central Hospital in central Japan, welcoming visitors at the entrance and answering spoken inquiries. These robots can carry luggage and escort visitors and patients to their destinations.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)