At any given time, the brightest minds in the world are hard at work attempting to cure mankind’s most pressing ailments: mitigating the effects of Global Climate Change; working out how to avert impending global food shortages; building 5-meter tall humanoid robots that transform into cars…

If that last item on the list doesn’t seem to you to quite belong, you would be forgiven; you simply don’t know any better. From impressing children at birthday parties, to impressing other children at other birthday parties, the applications for a humanoid-to-car robot transformer are literally endless.

Enter Project J-deite. As you probably could have guessed, Project J-deite is an effort headed-up by the Japanese, led by robotics outfit BRAVE ROBOTICS, Inc. The group is working toward a 5-meter tall transforming robot by the year 2020, developing a series of increasingly larger proofs of concept along the way.

The video below is from a Project J-deite update, showing off the group’s working quarter-scale transformer. We suggest muting the audio, because that generic rawk music gets old in a hurry. In its humanoid form, the robot stands an impressive 1.3 meters tall, and weighs just 35 kg. Plus, it’s capable of bipedal movement at a speed around 1 km/h. In its vehicular form, it can speed along at 10 times that speed.

Project J-deite is truly a wildly creative interpretation of the term “autonomous car,” and it’s nothing if not impressive. Still, we have to wonder why it exists.

For a full description of the project, along with some delightfully charming syntactical and typographical English errors, head on over to the Project J-deite website.