Tech Check: Donkey Gelatin Devices and Westworld-Esque Droids at Beijing's World Robot Conference

We can build it. We have the technology. This device will cure ailments, and turn a time-honored traditional Chinese medicine treatment (TCM) into an every day convenience. The device will do so by synthesizing and dispensing ... donkey-hide gelatin?

Despite what that sounds like, it's not a sci-fi parody (though anyone hoping to spoof the The Six Million Dollar Man, take note). Instead, it's was one of the many technological feats on display at this year's World Robot Conference (WRC) in Beijing.

The recently wrapped five-day conference featured a number of cutting-edge inventions. Among the strangest was a robot that automated the process to make ejiao, TCM tonic consisting of boiled and refined donkey flesh.

“With the robot we can cover the entire ejiao production process automatically, including boiling, refining, storage, transportation, cutting, and packaging,” Zhu Lei, vice president of Harbin's HIT Robot Group, told Xinhua of the donkey skin spewing invention. “It is faster than traditional methods and saves on labor.”

Other notable robots on display included the SmartTuna underwater mechanic, built to swim down to great depths to fix leaky deep sea pipelines, and highly realistic humanoid droids (pictured at top). The latter were developed by China's University of Science and Technology, and Business Insider said their resemblance to real people was so "uncanny" that they were akin to robots depicted on the recently debuted hit series Westworld. See for yourself by checking out Business Insider's video coverage of the conference here. On top of that, one of these robots, named Jiajia is sophisticated enough to recognize the faces, genders, ages, and facial expressions of the oh-so-low tech humans in its midst. Reuters, meanwhile, recently published a photo of a robot from the Siasun Robot and Automation Corporation that operated of a medical instrument on a human skeleton model at the conference.

Do you think these robots are impressive? What kind of feats do you hope to see achieved at next year's conference? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Photos: Business Insider, Reuters