One hundred robots danced in unison to the tune of music on Tuesday (January 20) in a fashion reminiscent of the North Korean mass games.

The 34 centimetre-tall, one-kilogram robot, named 'Robi', was designed by Tomotaka Takahashi who manages the robotics company Robo Garage.

If you think you've seen this robot somewhere before, you are right.

Takahashi designed a similar robot called Kirobo, which blasted off to the international space station last year, as well as the Panasonic Evolta robot.

But you can't buy Robi off the shelf. You have to build it.

Toy and publishing company DeAgostini Japan dismantled the robot into 75 pieces and put them in a weekly magazine on Robi.

A full complement of robot parts does not come cheap at 140,000 yen (£785), if you bought all weekly magazines.

To date, about 60,000 Robi's have been completed, according to the company.

Takahashi believes that robots that talk will be the next hot thing since the mobile phone and even foresees a union of the two.

With one of the world's fastest ageing and shrinking populations, the Japanese government hopes robots are the answer to a vanishing workforce.

A draft government growth strategy obtained by Reuters calls for a "robotic revolution" that would increase the use of robots in agriculture 20-fold and double manufacturing use.

The country has also recently released a string of robots which talk and mimic human behaviour.

Japan's overall robotics market was worth about 860 billion yen (£5.55 billion) in 2012 and is forecast to more than triple in value to 2.85 trillion yen by 2020, according to a trade ministry report in 2013.

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