Toyota humanoid strategy targets factories in robotics push
Toyota plans to deploy 400,000 robots as part of a $6.4 billion annual factory automation investment plan, according to the Financial Times, as it seeks to commercialise two decades of robotics research. Its humanoid ambitions sit within that broader automation programme, with its own factories taking priority over an external robot business.
About 250,000 of the planned robots are earmarked for Toyota group companies and their suppliers. The company is also establishing a dedicated robotics team under its chief production officer. The 400,000 figure covers robots broadly, rather than a stated order for humanoids.
The Toyota humanoid strategy combines internally developed hardware, robot learning models and a growing commercial ecosystem. Investors see an opportunity to compete with Tesla and Chinese manufacturers, but Toyota’s immediate operational case is more specific: automating factory work and addressing labour shortages.
Eley and the software behind physical tasks
Toyota’s internally developed Eley humanoid weighs 50 kilograms and, according to the FT, will use an in house foundation model to learn tasks by observing factory workers. Target activities include fine motor work such as moving parts between boxes.
Its California based Toyota Research Institute has developed a foundation model that translates high level decisions into precise physical actions and real time motor control. The FT reports that the model is being used in Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid, giving Toyota’s robotics research a role beyond its own hardware.
There is also an existing deployment business. Walden Robotics, a Toyota AI robotics spinout, emerged from stealth in July with $300 million in funding at a $1.1 billion valuation. According to the report, its general purpose robots have already been deployed at Toyota factories in North America.
Bernstein analyst Masahiro Akita told the FT that Toyota’s advantage could lie in integrating robots, AI and production processes into a stronger operating system, rather than solely in developing sophisticated robot hardware. That is a different competitive proposition from selling a standalone humanoid: the production process itself becomes part of the product.
Factory demand sets the priorities
Toyota’s head of humanoid robotics research, Tomohiro Nomi, set out the deployment priority in a presentation earlier this year: “We’re giving the highest priority to deploying robots in our own factories, where there is real demand and where the environment can be controlled.”
Some investors remain cautious about treating robotics as a major standalone business for a company producing roughly 10 million cars annually. Goldman Sachs analysts nevertheless estimate that Toyota could capture 3 to 8 per cent of the humanoid market by 2035, equivalent to 190,000 to 540,000 units. Those figures are analyst projections, not Toyota production commitments.
A planned vehicle assembly plant near Nagoya offers another potential site for robotics integration. Toyota expects the facility, its first new assembly plant in Japan since 2012, to begin operating in the early 2030s.
Source: ft.com
