Besides eating with sticks and watching huge dudes try to bump each other out of a ring, the Japanese are known for their love of robots. Walking robots, talking robots, fighting robots, even sexy robots. If it’s metal, has servo motors, and follows Asimov’s Three Laws, the chances are it’s hot in Japan.

Here’s a round up of some Japanese robot stories that caught our eye over the past week. Enjoy!

Fighting Robots [via Drawn]

Check out the action from the Robo-1 Grand Championship. Pure awesome.

Lady Bird robot cleans the toilet and can give you directions. [Via Inventor Spot]

Cleaning grimy highway rest stops is a job barely fit for humans, but never fear: the disturbingly cute, talking Lady Bird robot will begin scrubbing Japanese public toilets in 2009!

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Like the better robot vacuums, Lady Bird features obstacle sensors that help it avoid collisions with restroom fixtures and the occasional user. Speaking of the latter, Lady Bird is designed to be cute, friendly and helpful - this is Japan, after all. It displays a smiling face and a pair of stubby antennae that enable a very unique feature: speech recognition capability via a built-in voice synthesizer. Lady Bird can make conversation if spoken to!

Balancing Robot Takes a Kicking and Keeps on Licking

Japanese researchers have created a robot that will stay upright on it’s feet no matter how much it gets pushed and prodded and poked. Read the story here, the video is here.

Toyota’s Newest Robot Plays the Trumpet

Totally Crazy. Check out Toyota’s complete lineup of helper robots. It plays the violin too.

I for one welcome the coming rule of our robot overlords. All hail Bender!