Japan’s Suzumo (company slogan: “We Love Rice”) has developed a line of sushi-making robots, one of which can make 3,600 mounds of nigiri rice in an hour. Wired.com says Suzumo was hyping the machines at last week’s World Food and Beverage Great Expo 2012 in Tokyo.

Unfortunately, as the following video demonstrates, the sushi-making robots still need humans just a little. “Just a little” meaning humans must rinse, cook, and season the rice, prep the vegetables, and cut the nori to the right size, slice the fish, and layer it all onto the machine-made slabs of rice or rice-on-nori. Suzumo’s bots then produce maki that seem oddly familiar to anyone who’s ever used a cigarette-rolling machine. As this Suzumo video shows, all it takes to produce robo sushi is a technician in a lab coat and an audio track that goes from Olympics-scale anthem to disco to a funk groove that must have been laid down by Chuck Mangione’s session guys:

Doesn’t really look that much easier than rolling maki with a bamboo mat. Or, for that matter, a Tupperware set and a techno soundtrack:

Via Wired and MSNBC Tech

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