Fukagawa Nakamise Shopping Street's Sweeper Robot 'Banta' Retires After 15 Years
A symbiotic robot named Banta, which has swept the walkway and made nightly rounds at Fukagawa Nakamise shopping street since 2011, was retired on the 13th after the manufacturer discontinued its parts. The shopping association held a small thank-you gathering before the morning's opening, and regular customers came to see it off. The fact that no formal procedure exists for a robot's retirement underscored how its legal status remains, as ever, unsettled.
Banta is a boxy, four-wheeled cleaning robot equipped with a combined brush-and-mop unit and simple obstacle avoidance. True to the norm that symbiotic robots must not resemble humans too closely, it has no face and no limbs. The shopping association jointly introduced it in 2011, and for fifteen years it swept the arcade's walkway by day and patrolled the shuttered street at night, checking for anything out of order. It is the same model as "Unit Two," the robot at this paper's own newsroom, and was, at the time, still a relatively rare long-duration model.
"The name 'Banta' comes from the old neighborhood gatekeepers of the past — the association chairman at the time gave it that name," said Mamoru Tachibana, 68, the current shopping association chairman. "It had no face, but everyone still said 'good morning' to it."
In August this year, a key drive component broke, and when the association checked with the manufacturer, it learned that part had been discontinued in 2019 and that redesigning a replacement would not be cost-effective. While the association considers a replacement unit, it decided, "If nothing else, we wanted to see it off from within the shopping street," and set the 13th as the retirement date.
Before opening on the morning of the 13th, the association placed paper decorations and a small bouquet around Banta, and about twenty regular customers and nearby residents gathered to see it off. "It was just a machine I passed every morning, but knowing it would be gone suddenly made me feel the loss," said the woman who runs a nearby coffee shop, 74. "It's not a funeral, and I don't know what to call this, but still."
At the previously reported robot-law council, the legal status of symbiotic robots — property, or a form of limited personhood — has now been carried over for the 14th straight year. "Whether Banta has personhood or not is too difficult a question for me," the association chairman said. "But I think there ought to be some established way, somewhere, to say 'thank you for your service' when one retires." The association plans to introduce a replacement unit from a different manufacturer next month; it has not yet been named.
