YOKOHAMA, Japan — At the Robodex show here this week Japanese companies unwrapped platforms and supporting technology designed to make robots a mainstream consumer electronics market. Their goal is to boost the robot industry as the PC industry did with abundant, inexpensive and interoperable components.

"The Japanese economy is stagnant, but it is hot for robots," said Tadatoshi Doi, president of Sony Corp.'s Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories. "We see the robot industry as the first new industry of the 21st century [and as] a Japan-originated industry."

A total of 38 companies, universities and research organizations exhibited 95 robots here. Commercial models and prototypes alike were more human-like, friendlier and smarter than the robots shown at last year's Robodex.

Toshiba Corp., in its first Robodex appearance, proposed a new open architecture for robotics and showed a prototype home robot based on the architecture. A Fujitsu Ltd. subsidiary unveiled a motion control system based on a neural network. The Kitano Symbiotic System project and Leading Edge Design offered a platform for development of robot components.

"The PC industry grew thanks to abundant, inexpensive, high-performance components," said Takayuki Furuta, group leader of the symbiotic-intelligence group at Kitano, an advanced-technology project of the Japan Science and Technology Corp. "If sensors and actuators suitable for robots are available, it should be easy to build robots," putting robotics on a PC-like growth curve, he said.

The show was timed to correspond with the birthday of Japan's beloved comic-book robot, Astro Boy. According to the wildly popular comic, its hero was "born" on April 7, 2003. Hence, the date is significant to fans, and the event was expected to draw 70,000 attendees.

Astro Boy movies, TV programs, music, magazines and related products are expected to generate more than ¥ 500 billion ($4.2 billion) in sales over the next three years.

Sanyo Electric Co. and robot-development venture tmsuk Co. said it was forming a joint-venture sales company named tmsuk Sanyo as of Astro Boy's birthday. The pair plan to offer 50 copies of a robot named Banryu, marketing it as the first commercial, utility robot for home use. Test marketing will begin this month, and the 4-foot robot is priced at about $16,500.

Banryu walks at 15 meters per minute and can step over a 15-cm threshold. It has sensors for images, sounds and smoke detection. It can detect an emergency and report it to the owner through the NTT Docomo PHS mobile phone's TV function. The owner can see the situation remotely and control the robot over the phone.

"We have already gotten orders for 20 units. Based on user feedback, we will finalize a volume-sale model and will begin volume production this year," said Yasuhiro Suseki, president of tmsuk Sanyo.

Fujitsu has been offering a robot development platform called the Humanoid for Open Architecture Platform, or Hoap, through Fujitsu Automation Ltd. The second-generation Hoap-2 sells for about $48,000.

Research subsidiary Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has also developed a motion control system for robots that uses a dynamically reconfigurable neural network. It is based on a combination of a central pattern generator (CPG) network and the numerical perturbation approach, said Fumio Nagashima, senior researcher of Fujitsu's peripheral systems laboratories.

Nagashima said he optimized CPG, a mathematical simulation of the neural oscillator found in vertebrates, for the NP method. It is used to quantify the configuration and connection-weight status of the network, Nagashima said.