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You wouldn’t normally equate cardboard boxes and beds with the world’s most famous sporting event, but trust Tokyo to do things a little differently. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics has, ever since the beginning, advocated keeping a low carbon footprint for the global event by reusing as many resources as possible. They’ve forged their Olympic medals from rare-earth materials sourced from e-waste, and even made torches out of metal used in temporary housing units that were created as shelter for the victims of the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Organizers of the 2020 Olympic event have announced yet another area of intervention for their eco-friendly approach. Beds.
The Olympics hosts as many as 18,000 athletes (as well as an additional 8,000 athletes for the Paralympics), and the beds for them will be provided by Japanese company (and Olympics partner) Airweave. The beds will be crafted from high-resistance cardboard, which isn’t just environmentally friendly, but is stronger than wood too. In fact, the beds can take on as much as 200 kgs of weight (which is far more than any athlete weighed in the 2016 Rio Olympics). The mattresses and pillows will be supplied by Airweave too, featuring a polyethylene construction that can be easily recycled after the month-long event that starts on the 9th of August and ends on the 6th of September with the Paralympics.
“This will be the first time in Olympic and Paralympic history that all villages’ beds and bedding are made almost entirely from renewable materialism,’ say Tokyo 2020 Olympic officials. Tokyo 2020 hopes to minimize resource wastage for its global event and has set a target of recycling or reusing as much as 99% of all items and good procured!
Created by the Gold Partner of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Asics has released a special edition of their Gel-Quantum running shoes with a vibrant color gradient and the Tokyo 2020 branding on the sides as well as the shoe tongue and rear. The shoes come with gel-cushioning in the rearfoot and forefoot and were created as a special commemorative series for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. I imagine the rainbow gradient would look absolutely fantastic when in motion, and I don’t see why this shouldn’t become a collectible item sometime in the future!
I’m here in Tokyo this week for the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show, and while here, I stopped by the new headquarters for the Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development (TRI-AD) to check out some of the technologies the company and their partners are working on.
Among the many futuristic machines on display during my visit is a specialized robot which will be in use during the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics right here in Tokyo.
The Toyota Field Support Robot (aka FSR) is designed to assist the on-field staff during sporting events by retrieving and carrying cumbersome objects like shotputs, javelins, and and discuses thrown during field events.
These specialized robots can automatically follow a member of the field crew out to the location of a tossed object, where it awaits its payload. The human then loads the item into the robot, and then it autonomously drives the item back to the staging area, avoiding people and obstacles automatically along the way. The idea here is to reduce the time it takes to retrieve these heavy and awkward objects, as well as to demonstrate autonomous vehicle technologies.
In the demonstration I saw, they had the robot limited to a slow speed for safety reasons, but in the field, they can drive up to 20 km/h, and operate for up to 2 hours on a charge.
The robots come in two different designs – one that looks like a miniature version of Toyota’s autonomous e-Palette EV, and the other that looks like a classic Japanese taxi cab – which I think looks awesome.
While I think it would be even cooler if the robot could pick up items by itself, TRI-AD say the idea here is to foster partnership between humans and robots, rather than to replace humans. This is a key pillar of Toyota’s philosophy for the integration of automation and artificial intelligence into its business and the world as a whole.
Keep an eye on the field events during the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games to see the Field Support Robot in action.
Exosuits, exoskeletons and power-assist suits are mostly a thing of science fiction, used for battling alien menaces or lifting extremely heavy obstacles. Mostly. Now companies like Panasonic are making the case for actually using one. The reality is...
Twitter says it can no longer predict, with any certainty, how its finances are going to look in the coming months. The company told investors that it was withdrawing its guidance as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For a platform that ties its fut...
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has finally accepted that the summer games in Tokyo can't go ahead. Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, asked Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, for a delay on the phone earlier today. The coronavirus pan...
The Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic games are still on schedule to take place this summer, and Japan's public broadcaster has been planning for years to make sure its an 8K showcase event. If you're in Japan, 8K broadcasts with 22.2 channel audio are av...
No, the OurMine group isn't done defacing high-profile sites. Twitter has confirmed reports that OurMine hijacked accounts for both the Olympics and FC Barcelona on February 15th, using the opportunity to make a less-than-sincere offer to "improve y...
With the Tokyo 2020 Olympics mere months away, Samsung says it will give athletes taking part in the competition a special version of the Galaxy S20+. Dubbed the Olympic Games Athlete Edition, the "Mirror Gold" phone features the Olympic rings toward...
The 2020 Olympic Summer Games don't commence for six months, but plenty of marketing work goes into the international event well beforehand. NBC, which owns the media rights to the Olympic Games, has renewed its deal with Snap to publish daily covera...
