As of 2006, the robot conducted a performance test at Nagaoka University of Technology and successfully lifted a car from a snowbank.
The 3.5-metre-tall robot can either be driven from a cockpit positioned at the front of the robot or it can be controlled remotely as like its cousin the Banryu, it contains multiple CCD cameras which transmit to the remote driver - in this case, it has seven 6.8-megapixel CCD cams mounted on its "head", "torso" and "arms".
[1] The robot does not have a program installed in it, need to be taught how to operate, or has any sensors to help it see because the human controls it.
The urge to build such advanced rescue robots begun after experts realized the amount of damage natural disasters did in the past decade alone.
According to the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) there was 3852 disasters in the last decade in which over three quarters of a million of people died, and cost an amount $960 billion to fix damaged buildings and help people pay their hospital bills.
[1] In the first method, the driver has to climb inside the robot and manually control it just like if it was a construction machine.