Japan's newest museum guides are robots

Robot overlords have officially taken over Japan.

At the National Museum of Emerging Science in Tokyo, human tour guides have been replaced with human-like robot women. The Associated Press reports that a group of university professors, who are robotics experts, created the robots to learn more about human interaction.

"Making androids is about exploring what it means to be human, [and] examining the question of what is emotion, what is awareness, what is thinking," Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University who has been developing robots for more than 20 years, told the AP.

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The life-size robots, which have silicon skin and even artificial muscles, can speak in a variety of voices, read the news, and respond to human conversation. Ishiguro predicts that as time progresses, robots will become a part of everyday human life. --Meghan DeMaria