Japanese people are love new technologies and gadgets. Even if the gadgets are a bit weird. Take the new laundry dehydrator for example, it looks weird but it’s pretty cool.

Most clothes dryers use heat to dry the clothes. The problem with such dryers is that they use lot of electricity, and sometime even ruin delicate clothes because of the intense heat.

The fast laundry dehydrator uses dehumidification to extract the water out of the clothes within 3-5 minutes. Leaving them dry and without any damage. The only problem is that you have to hold the cloth while doing that, which may require several hours if you aren’t’ doing laundry each day.

According to the manufacturer this process also saves energy, which is good for both your electricity bill and planet earth. The dehydrator from Somela will cost $173 (18,000 yen).

This isn’t the first time Japanese scientists try to re-invent the laundry machine. Back in August, Toshiba introduced a new washing machine that is also a dryer and an air-conditioner. While will someone want this weird washing machine? We have no clue. But Toshiba thinks you’ll pay about $2,949 dollars (310,000 Yen) in order to have this kind of washing machine at home – models not included.

Product age (Japanese): [Rakuten], Translated [Rakuten]

Toshiba Washing machine (Japanese): [Watch Impress]

A new robot is supposed to clean urinals. The engineers at Mertec Engineering, the company that brought us this life-changing invention, claim that the robot can save eight liters of water while cleaning urinals. And it does this in only 10 seconds. If you happen to be in Kobe airport, you can watch the invention in action.

The robot is called “DASUBEE” that after the letters DCBA, which are ACBC backwards. The origin for that name is the reverse process which help the robot clean the urinals. No points on copywriting here.

Anyway, If you want it to help you with your cleaning chores, you should prepare to cough up 1,000,000 Yen, which are like $9,600. Let us save you the calculation, you can buy lot’s of brushes and detergent with this kind of money. In the mean time you can relax with a bunch of robots killing each other or some useless robots.

More: [3yen]

Source (Japanese): [Robot Watch]

The annual Meiwa Electronics annual Stupid Robot Contest, is held every year and the competitors must obey the following rules: the robot must be mechanical, It must be completely useless and it must make people laugh. Loyal readers of Japanite knows already that this can be applied to a lot of Japanese inventions throughout the year, without even a contest.

One of the robots, Papa Robopucho (picture above) is playing flags game with himself and sometime just cries for help. another example is this one, that I hope is inventor knows what it’s doing:

Last year you could see maid robots inspired from maid cafes in Akihabara (inventors probably haven’t heard about the new mom cafes trend), and a child robot that did push-ups.

This is also from last year:

So, What robot will you suggest to the competition? Share with us in the comments.

More info and videos (japanese): [Robot Watch] and [Bacarobo]

and more on the contests in [Meiwa]