Not that long ago, Japan was the undisputed world leader in humanoid robotics.
It’s where humanoids learned to walk, recognize faces and emotions, and operate safely around people. In the Y2K era, the mainstream assumption was that the world would be full of robot helpers today, and they’d mostly be Japanese.
When China unveiled its first humanoid prototypes in the early 2000s, the reaction from Japan was mostly dismissive. There were even satirical cartoons mocking them. Now, in 2026, Japan (along with the rest of the world) finds itself racing to catch up with the People’s Republic, where hundreds of robotics firms are developing humanoids that are now entering the Japanese workforce.
Japan’s government is pushing for a robot renaissance to address what it considers an existential crisis. Nearly a third of its citizens are older than 65, and low birth rates mean there aren’t enough younger workers to replace them. Officials view automation and robotics the only realistic solution to widespread labor shortages across sectors.
The moment is spawning a new breed of humanlike machines, including the most advanced version yet of one of Japan’s longest-running programs, born from the birthplace of humanoid experimentation.
The Rise of Tokyo Robotics
Tokyo Robotics was launched in 2015 as a spinoff from Waseda University, the same institution that pioneered humanoid robotics in the 1970s with the WABOT-1, widely considered the world’s first full-scale humanoid.
However, the robotics firm’s initial focus was not the humanoid form factor. Instead, the small team of engineers set out to develop machines capable of replicating human-level dexterity.
At the time, Japan was considered a global leader in both humanoids and industrial robotics. Honda’s ASIMO was still viewed as the world’s most advanced humanoid robot in terms of mobility and balance. The latest iteration of ASIMO could do things that are still considered impressive by today’s standards. It could run at speeds up to 9 km/h (5.6 mph), hop on one foot, climb stairs smoothly, recognize people’s faces and voices, and pull of simple service tasks.
But despite all that, it had major limitations that were becoming impossible to ignore. Its hands were too simple for complex manipulation tasks. It worked best in highly controlled environments, and it required significant engineering resources to program basic behaviors. Most importantly, it had no intelligence or way to adapt in ways that would make it useful to the masses.
Business leaders considered the project a dead end and shifted focus toward humanoids that were approachable and engaging like Softbank’s Pepper. The lion’s share of robotics R&D investments went toward industrial automation, where Japan was dominant globally. Companies like Fanuc and Yaskawa were making next-generation industrial robots faster, more precise, and more reliable for repetitive factory work.
Tokyo Robotics sought to position itself in the middle ground, where the missing ingredient was becoming glaringly obvious. Robots that were making money were extremely reliable, but they were only built for a limited set of use cases. If they could master precise manipulation, it would open up a world of possibilities.
Torobo Series
The company’s early robotic arms had high degrees of freedom, with torque-controlled joints and force sensors to adjust grip strength on the fly. Tokyo Robotics began demonstrating its Torobo platform in 2017, and by the next year it had matured into a more recognizable humanoid-style system.
The startup commercialized Torobo as a modular suite of hardware and software. At its core was a system with 7-axis arms and full-body sensing. Later offerings included:
- Torobo Hand, a four-fingered end effector with nearly 200 tactile sensing points,
- Torobo Puppet, a teleoperation interface for users to control the robot remotely,
- and the Torobo Eye for 3D perception.
The Yaskawa Acquisition
Tokyo Robotics remained research focused, raising under $2 million in total funding until 2025 when it was acquired by the Japanese industrial leader Yaskawa Electric Corporation. The acquisition, whose financial terms were not disclosed, was basically an admission that industrial robots had hit a ceiling.
Founded in 1915, Yaskawa operates across 30 countries with a network of more than 80 subsidiaries. It’s established manufacturing and support hubs in North America, Europe, and across Asia. Yaskawa has a sizable customer base to sell next-gen solutions into. It’s reported shipping hundreds of thousands of industrial robots and millions of motion-control products.
It’s expanding its presence in the United States significantly. The company is building a major new manufacturing campus in Wisconsin. The Franklin plant will be Yaskawa’s first high-volume production facility on US soil. The $180 million project’s development is expected to roll out over several years, ultimately consolidating existing facilities into the central hub in the 2030s.
Yaskawa is part of what’s known as the Big 4 of industrial robotics companies. The collective also includes Fanuc, ABB, and Kuka. Within its direct competitive group, Yaskawa appears to be the first with a serious humanoid program.
Brand New Torobo
The backing has apparently shot adrenaline into the Torobo platform, which had been progressing relatively slowly in recent years.
Tokyo Robotics recently offered a first look at the bipedal version of its flagship humanoid robot, the result of more than a decade of research and development.
Torobo achieved its humanlike walking gait through large-scale reinforcement learning and simulation training. Its digital twin practiced millions of simulated steps and interactions in the virtual world to learn stable bipedal locomotion and to recover from disturbances. The learned behaviors were then transferred to Torobo’s hardware via a process called Sim2Real, short for Simulation to Reality.
The company’s stated mission is to expand Torobo into manufacturing, logistics, and service roles, and basically anywhere else repetitive and physically demanding work exists.
Donut’s Cinnamon 1
Torobo is one of several Japanese humanoid robots marching toward commercialization across sectors.
Another Tokyo-based firm, Donut Robotics, recently revealed its bipedal humanoid that’s designed specifically for noisy work environments. Launched in 2014, the company says its first adult-scale robotic humanoid, named Cinnamon 1, understands human gestures commonly used in settings too loud for voice interactions, like construction sites and factories.
According to its developers, the current version of Cinnamon 1 is an early-stage prototype built on externally sourced hardware. But Donut says it layers its own software stack on top and plans to move toward fully in-house systems over time.
They’re targeting initial pilots as early as 2026.
Kawasaki’s Kaleido
A much more established Japanese company, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, is also pushing its flagship humanoid into the real world.
The industrial powerhouse unveiled the ninth-generation iteration of its Kaleido humanoid at the 2025 International Robot Exhibition (IREX) in Tokyo, alongside its futuristic robotic horse CORLEO. The Kaleido 9 inherits decades of robotics research from Kawasaki, which built Japan’s first domestically produced industrial robot in 1969 in collaboration with Unimation (the maker of Unimate). Robots have been a core part of its portfolio ever since.
Kawasaki has been exploring the humanoid form factor for well over two decades. In the early 2000s, the company contributed to the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)’s Humanoid Robot Project (HRP), developing tech for remote control and teleoperation.
The Kaleido platform’s development began around 2015. The newest version towers over the OG version at 190 cm (6 feet 3 inches). It’s also heavier at about 99 kg (218 lbs). However, it has far better balance, sensing, and control. The Kaleido 9 has LiDAR sensors and enhanced stereo cameras for building 3D maps of its surroundings and autonomous navigation.
Kawasaki says it will integrate the robot into its wider robotics ecosystem to work alongside existing machines like its industrial robots and autonomous mobile bots.
Japan’s Affinity for Telepresence
Japan is already scaling deployment of humanoid robots through telepresence, which aligns with its social needs and cultural norms.
OryLab is known for its humanoids that are piloted by humans, often with severe disabilities, that work at its Dawn Avatar Robot Cafe in Tokyo. The robotics firm was founded by Kentaro Yoshifuji, who says he was frequently ill as a child and spent long periods isolated from school and social life. In college, he created a small android replica of his bust to attend classes remotely when he was in poor health.
Now his niche social experiment is turning into a scalable real-world workforce platform, with platforms testing how the technology is received in non-urban environments.
Ishiguro’s Lifelike Androids
And then there’s the famed Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who’s making major moves to commercialize his long-running android research.
The Osaka University professor has been going viral since the 2000s with his ultra-realistic humanoid robots, including his self-replica Geminoid and the conversational android Erica.
The company he founded in 2021, AVITA, is bringing its digital avatar technology into the physical realm with help from a Japanese telecom giant and China’s leaders in humanoid robotics. Read the full story right here.