The Beautiful, Scary Robots of Shigeo Hirose

From Gizmodo:

There are plenty of robot builders, but none bring as much elegance to engineering as Shigeo Hirose. His creatures are Star Wars, Iron Giant and Dean Kamen rolled into one cybernetic maki. Truth is, I'd never heard of Shigeo Hirose or the Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab at Tokyo Tech until I read Wired for War—author PW Singer, featured in our interview here, sings the praises of the robot master, possibly the world's foremost. As you can see in the montage and the rundown, below, the dude has been building stuff for years, and things he designed 30 years ago, still seem startling compared to the commercial robotics we've grown used to. Swimming snakes, tiny velociraptors, and giant hands that close around women's waists—this guy seems to know that the real fuel of robotic development is a careful combination of humor and fear.