This Real-Life Gundam Suit Could Be Yours—for $3 Million

It’s a scene seemingly ripped out of a sci-fi cartoon: A man crawls into a massive robotic suit and begins controlling it from the inside using joysticks. However, one Tokyo-based company is showing the world that this technology is very much real—and it might one day be used to explore the moon and Mars.

Japanese robotics company Tsubame Industries recently unveiled the 3.5 ton, 15-foot tall robot dubbed Archax (named after the winged dinosaur archaeopteryx) that can be piloted from the inside by a human. The suit was modeled after the battle bots from the popular anime “Mobile Suit Gundam,” though its creators say that it’ll be used less for epic battles and more for saving lives and as a tool for space exploration.

“Japan is very good at animation, games, robots, and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one,” Ryo Yoshida, the CEO of Tsubame, told Reuters.

That said, you can use it for whatever you want so long as you can afford the $3 million price tag. The company has recently begun accepting pre-orders for five different versions of the machine.

The body of the Archax is made of steel, with a cockpit inside of the bot’s torso, which a pilot climbs into using a ladder. Inside is an array of four screens connected to nine cameras outside of the cockpit, allowing the pilot to see their surroundings. The entire system is operated using joysticks and two floor pedals, which control the robot’s arms and its four wheels, which propel it to a max speed of six miles per hour.

While that might sound impressive at first blush, the company states on its website that the current version of the robot isn’t built to withstand the harsh conditions of disaster relief or space operations. Rather, it’s simply supposed to look “cool” while showcasing the potential of such a future robot, according to the company.

However, now that they’re taking pre-orders, Yoshida says he hopes that future versions of the Archax will be able to be used for both disaster relief and space exploration. Considering the TV version of Gundams were used for war, it no doubt has potential applications on the battlefield as well.

And, above all, Yoshida said the project maintains a firm sense of national pride. “I wanted to create something that says, ‘This is Japan’,” he explained.

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