Behold,

Russia’s Most Modern Robot,

 yesterday, during the opening of Russia’s annual “PROJECT” scientific forum in the city of Yaroslavl, the audience got to see Boris, a highly-advanced robot that major news channel Russia24 called “the country’s most modern robot”, very similar in appearance to Honda’s famous Asimo humanoid robot, Boris can reportedly walk and talk, do mathematical calculations and even dance, feats he demonstrated on the stage of the “PROJECT” forum, on December 11, the audience, made up primarily of young students, was blown away by the Russian robot’s advanced capabilities, as were several news outlets, including Russia24, which dedicated a news segment to Boris, showcasing his performance at the forum and calling it “Russia’s most modern robot”, but, everyone wondered where Boris’ sensors were located, as its head seemed to only feature LED lights for eyes and mouth, how could it perform all these feats, and be aware of its surroundings without any sensors? then there was some controversy about its speech capabilities, Boris didn’t feature any speakers and there was no microphone anywhere close to it when it spoke, but a robotic voice could be heard from the speakers in the hall whenever it was asked a question, a lot of people were convinced that Boris’ voice was in fact pre-recorded, things were definitely not adding up,

with so many questions surrounding the surprise unveiling of this “advanced robot”, it didn’t really come as a surprise to anyone that Boris wasn’t actually a robot at all, a simple Google search of “robotic suit” (in Russian) revealed that the humanoid robot was really just a commercially available robot suit called the “Alesha Robot Costume“, it looks just like Boris and it can be yours for 250,000 rubles ($3,765), well I suppose that is one way to win the Most Modern Robot in Russia award!