As of January 15, 2025, PlayStation's Shuhei Yoshida will leave Sony but not retire from the industry entirely. Yoshida made the announcement while on the PlayStation Podcast Tuesday (a condensed transcription of the interview appears on the official PlayStation blog.) He hasn't provided a reason why he's leaving. Many know Yoshida as Sony Interactive's Head of Indies Initiative, a position he got in 2019. In other words, he's in charge of getting indie games onto PlayStation consoles by networking with indie developers and promoting the games they made.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Tokyo-based start-up Tsubame Industries has developed a 14.8-feet, four-wheeled robot that looks like "Mobile Suit Gundam" from the wildly popular Japanese animation series, and it can be yours for $3 million. Called ARCHAX after the avian dinosaur archaeopteryx, the robot has cockpit monitors that receive images from cameras hooked up to the exterior so that the pilot can manoeuvre the arms and hands with joysticks from inside its torso. The 3.5-ton robot, which will be unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show later this month, has two modes: the upright'robot mode' and a'vehicle mode' in which it can travel up to 6 miles per hour.

Tokyo-based startup Tsubame Industries has developed a 4.5-meter-tall (14.8-feet), four-wheeled robot that looks like "Mobile Suit Gundam" from the wildly popular Japanese animation series, and it can be yours for $3 million. Called ARCHAX after the avian dinosaur archaeopteryx, the robot has cockpit monitors that receive images from cameras hooked up to the exterior so that the pilot can maneuver the arms and hands with joysticks from inside its torso. The 3.5-ton robot, which will be unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show later this month, has two modes: the upright "robot mode" and a "vehicle mode" in which it can travel up to 10 kilometers per hour (6 miles per hour). "Japan is very good at animation, games, robots and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one," said Ryo Yoshida, the 25-year-old chief executive of Tsubame Industries. "I wanted to create something that says, 'This is Japan.'"

Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh environments that picture extremely low gravity and highly uneven terrain. Our method plans the gait by decoupling the base and limbs' movements and adjusting the main body pose to avoid ground collisions. The proposed approach includes a motion planning that reduces the reactions generated by the robot's movement by optimizing the swinging trajectory and distributing the momentum. Lower motion reactions decrease the pulling forces on the grippers, avoiding the slippage and flotation of the robot. Dynamic simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed method could improve the robot's mobility on the surface of asteroids.

In early 1993, Shuhei Yoshida joined Sony's nascent PlayStation division as a business development guy – the first member of the team who didn't have an engineering background. When he was working with Ken Kutaragi and the other architects of the original PlayStation, and later producing games from Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo alongside game development legends Mark Cerny and Kazunori Yamauchi, he freely admits that he could scarcely believe his luck. When I speak to him, on the eve of receiving Bafta's prestigious fellowship award for his contribution to video games, he still seems endearingly surprised by his own success. "The people who have received [this award] before are all creators! I don't know how I fit in," he says.

Robotic mobility in microgravity is necessary to expand human utilization and exploration of outer space. Bio-inspired multi-legged robots are a possible solution for safe and precise locomotion. However, a dynamic motion of a robot in microgravity can lead to failures due to gripper detachment caused by excessive motion reactions. We propose a novel Reaction-Aware Motion Planning (RAMP) to improve locomotion safety in microgravity, decreasing the risk of losing contact with the terrain surface by reducing the robot's momentum change. RAMP minimizes the swing momentum with a Low-Reaction Swing Trajectory (LRST) while distributing this momentum to the whole body, ensuring zero velocity for the supporting grippers and minimizing motion reactions. We verify the proposed approach with dynamic simulations indicating the capability of RAMP to generate a safe motion without detachment of the supporting grippers, resulting in the robot reaching its specified location. We further validate RAMP in experiments with an air-floating system, demonstrating a significant reduction in reaction forces and improved mobility in microgravity.

Sony has revealed plans to start an electric car company, making it the latest electronics manufacturer to target the automotive sector. The Japanese tech firm is "exploring a commercial launch" of electric vehicles, and will launch a new company, Sony Mobility Inc, in the spring, its chairman and president, Kenichiro Yoshida, told a news conference before the Consumer Electronics Show in the US. Yoshida on Wednesday presented a prototype sport utility vehicle, the Vision-S 02, which uses the same electric vehicle platform as the previously announced Vision-S 01, a coupe that began testing on public roads in Europe from December 2020. "With our imaging and sensing, cloud, 5G and entertainment technologies combined with our content mastery, we believe Sony is well positioned as a creative entertainment company to redefine mobility," he said. An increasing number of consumer electronics companies have looked into targeting the burgeoning electric car market.

Sony first displayed an EV sedan at CES two years ago, but it said at the time it didn't necessarily plan to sell a Sony car. The initial prototype served to show off Sony's image sensors, which can be a key part of autonomous driving systems. The new Las Vegas announcement suggested Sony does plan to sell vehicles under its own brand rather than merely supplying its technology to other car makers. The company said it would establish a company called Sony Mobility Inc. in the spring. The EV market is getting increasingly crowded with Tesla Inc. leading the pack of EV-only companies competing against traditional car makers, almost all of which have announced ambitious plans to expand their EV offerings.

LAS VEGAS – Sony Group Corp. will set up a new unit in the spring for electric vehicles as it explores the possibility of launching the vehicles commercially, its CEO said Tuesday. Speaking at a media preview ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony Group CEO Kenichiro Yoshida said the new unit, Sony Mobility Inc., will aim to make the best use of artificial intelligence and robotics technology for EV development. At the same event in 2020, Sony unveiled a prototype EV, the Vision-S, which is equipped with technology for autonomous driving and aimed at enhancing the safety and comfort of mobility. The announcement came at a time when global competition has been intensifying over the development of EVs, with many automakers shifting to such vehicles for carbon emission reduction. At this year's preview, Yoshida also unveiled an SUV prototype of its Vision-S EV, which features seat speakers that create a three-dimensional sound field.

Honda Motor Co. has boosted its operating profit outlook for the current fiscal year, a sign sales are progressing well despite the global chip shortage that is disrupting the auto industry's supply chain. The automaker is targeting an operating profit of ¥520 billion ($5 billion) for the 12 months through March, compared with a prior forecast for ¥420 billion, it said in an exchange filing Tuesday. That compares with analysts' average projection for ¥469 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The rosier-than-expected outlook comes as a global chip shortage is straining many automakers. Housebound consumers have ramped up purchases of personal computers, tablets and video games, depleting semiconductor supplies that are essential to the technology needed in modern-day cars.