Kawada Robotics
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Kawada Robotics Corporation (川田ロボティクス) is a Japanese manufacturer of industrial and humanoid robots, best known for the Nextage dual-arm collaborative robot and for building several of the full-size humanoid robots used in Japan's national Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP). The company is part of the KTI Kawada Group, an industrial conglomerate whose core business has historically been steel-bridge fabrication and construction. Robotics began inside Kawada Industries in the late 1990s and was carved out into a dedicated company, Kawada Robotics Corporation, on 1 April 2013, headquartered in Taito-ku, Tokyo. Kawada is one of the longest-running corporate participants in Japanese humanoid robot development, with a track record stretching from the original HRP research platforms of the early 2000s to commercial factory robots sold into electronics, food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturing.
Kawada Robotics sits inside the KTI Kawada Group (also written "Kawada Group"), whose roots go back to 1922, when the blacksmith Chutaro Kawada founded the Kawada Ironworks in Toyama, Japan. That business grew into Kawada Industries, Inc., which became one of Japan's largest steel-bridge fabricators; the group says it has been involved in more than 4,000 steel bridges and completes roughly 60 bridges a year in Japan. Kawada Industries also works in steel structures, architecture (including prefabricated building systems) and environmental engineering.
In 2009 the group reorganized under a holding company, Kawada Technologies, Inc., created to oversee the group's businesses. Kawada Industries, Inc. remains the central operating company ("the nucleus of the Kawada Group"), and the broader group includes Kawada Construction Co., Ltd. (spun out of Kawada Industries' construction work), Kawada Technosystem, Kyouryou Maintenance, the air-transport firms Toho Air Service and New Central Air Service, the steel trader Fujimae Steel, and Kawada Robotics Corp.
| Entity | Role in the group | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kawada Technologies, Inc. | Holding company (established 2009) | Top of the KTI Kawada Group |
| Kawada Industries, Inc. | Core operating company (founded 1922 as Kawada Ironworks) | Steel bridges, steel structures, architecture, environment; originated the robotics business |
| Kawada Robotics Corp. | Robot development, design, manufacturing, sales, maintenance | Established 1 April 2013 in Taito-ku, Tokyo; capital 100 million yen |
Kawada Robotics Corporation was established on 1 April 2013 by spinning the robotics business and technology-development functions out of the Robotics Division of Kawada Industries, taking over robot manufacturing and sales. Its registered capital is 100,000,000 yen and it is headquartered in the Ueno East Building in Matsugaya, Taito-ku, Tokyo. Naohito Shiroma serves as president.
It is important not to confuse Kawada with Kawasaki. Kawasaki Heavy Industries is a separate, much larger Japanese company that also took part in the Humanoid Robotics Project; the two firms are unrelated despite the similar names and overlapping involvement in HRP.
Kawada traces its robotics work to its aviation department, set up in 1987 to develop small helicopters, which the company describes as the technological starting point for its later robot work. In 1999 Kawada designed and built the humanoid robot H6 on commission from the University of Tokyo, and in 2001 it produced isamu, its first internally developed humanoid. From 2002 onward Kawada became the industrial partner that physically built the HRP platforms designed with AIST, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
The robotics group inside Kawada Industries was reorganized and renamed in 2012, the same year it received a Robot Award for work on flexible assembly lines. Kawada Robotics Corp. was then established as a standalone company in April 2013, and the company describes a further "rebirth" or relaunch in 2015 when it took full end-to-end responsibility for robot development through to sales. The Nextage product line continued to be updated, with the NXA series in 2018 and the more compact Nextage Fillie in 2022.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1987 | Aviation (helicopter) department established at Kawada Industries; cited as the origin of the robotics business |
| 1999 | H6 humanoid built on commission for the University of Tokyo |
| 2001 | isamu, Kawada's first in-house humanoid |
| 2002 | HRP-2 Promet research platform (built with AIST) |
| 2007 | HRP-3 Promet Mk-II |
| 2009 | HIRO upper-body platform and Nextage industrial robot announced |
| 2010 | HRP-4 ("slim athlete" research platform, with AIST) |
| 2012 | Robotics Division renamed; Robot Award for flexible assembly |
| 2013 | Kawada Robotics Corp. established (1 April); Nextage Open with open-source software |
| 2015 | Relaunch of Kawada Robotics with full development-to-sales responsibility |
| 2018 | Nextage NXA series |
| 2022 | Nextage Fillie launched; won a Red Dot Design Award |
Nextage is Kawada's flagship commercial product: a stationary, dual-arm, human-collaborative robot with a humanoid upper body, designed for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing such as electronics assembly. Kawada and AIST first showed the robot in 2009, and it has since been adopted by manufacturers in electronics and electronic components, food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. The design intent, expressed in Kawada's slogan of robots working "side by side with people," is a machine that can be dropped into an existing human production line and operate without safety fencing.
A standard Nextage has a head with two cameras, a torso, and two six-axis arms mounted on a fixed base or stand. It has 15 controlled axes in total: six per arm, two for the head, and one for the waist. Every axis uses a low-power actuator rated under 80 watts, which under Japanese regulations lets the robot run without a protective cage because it cannot exert harmful force. The arms are shaped and arranged so the elbows do not swing outward into the surrounding workspace, a safety feature Kawada highlights. Stereo cameras in the head give the robot 3D vision, and additional cameras can be mounted on the arms; the system can use markers placed on workbenches to orient itself, so a unit can be reassigned between stations.
Reported specifications include a payload of about 2.5 kg per arm, a reach on the order of 625 mm, position repeatability around 0.03 mm, and vision-assisted accuracy near 0.5 mm. The Singularity Hub coverage in 2011 reported a price of roughly 7 to 8 million yen (about 100,000 US dollars at the time) and power consumption of about 1,500 watts, comparable to a hair dryer. Multiple units can cooperate on the same task, and because the robot detects people entering its space and avoids collisions, it is treated as a collaborative robot rather than a caged industrial robot.
Alongside the factory product, Kawada offers research-oriented variants. HIRO is an upper-body version used to study human-robot interaction. Nextage Open, introduced around 2013, is a version whose controller and software are open and compatible with the Robot Operating System (ROS); open-source support has been maintained by the Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association (TORK) through the rtmros_nextage software, which bridges Nextage to ROS and the OpenRTM and MoveIt motion-planning tools. This made Nextage a common platform in university robotics labs.
In 2022 Kawada launched Nextage Fillie, a smaller, lighter and faster successor to the conventional Nextage NXA, and the model won a Red Dot Design Award that year. Fillie keeps the dual-arm, 15-degree-of-freedom layout and the under-80-watt safety motors, with stereo head cameras for 3D mapping and optional hand cameras. It runs on the QNX real-time operating system with ROS compatibility. Kawada Technologies presented Nextage Fillie at CES 2026 in Las Vegas (held 6 to 9 January 2026), demonstrating component sorting, tool handling and interaction with visitors.
The Humanoid Robotics Project was a Japanese national program to develop human-scale humanoid robots, sponsored by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). The technical work was led by AIST, with Kawada Industries and Kawasaki Heavy Industries as the principal industrial partners. The HRP humanoids also carry the product name "Promet."
A general division of labor ran through the program: AIST led the research, control software and mechanical design (especially the human-like models), while Kawada built and integrated the hardware. The first platform, HRP-1, was based on three Honda P3 humanoids purchased from Honda and augmented with teleoperation and other systems. From the second generation onward the robots were original designs.
| Robot | Year | Height | Weight | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HRP-1 | late 1990s | ~160 cm | ~130 kg | Based on Honda P3, enhanced with teleoperation |
| HRP-2 Promet | 2002 | ~154 cm | ~58 kg | 30 DOF; can stand up after lying down; built by Kawada with AIST |
| HRP-3 Promet Mk-II | 2007 | ~161 cm | ~68 kg | Dust- and splash-resistant; works on slippery surfaces |
| HRP-4C "Miim" | 2009 | ~158 cm | ~43 kg | Female-appearance "cybernetic human"; AIST-developed with industry partners |
| HRP-4 | 2010 | ~151 cm | ~39 kg | Slim, lightweight research platform; with AIST |
| HRP-5P | 2018 | ~182 cm | ~101 kg | Heavy-labor prototype; 37 DOF; drywall/construction tasks; AIST |
HRP-2 (2002) was a research platform distributed to laboratories in Japan and abroad. Notably, unlike Honda's ASIMO, HRP-2 could get up off the floor after falling. Its external appearance was designed by the mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi. HRP-3 Promet Mk-II (2007) added dust and water resistance so it could operate outdoors and on slippery ground, and it could perform tasks such as tightening bolts by remote control. HRP-4 (2010) was a slimmer, lighter platform developed with AIST.
HRP-4C, nicknamed "Miim," was unveiled by AIST on 16 March 2009 as a "cybernetic human": a female-appearance humanoid roughly 158 cm tall and 43 kg, with proportions drawn from a 1990s Japanese body-dimension database. It used about 30 motors for body motion plus 8 for facial expressions, could sing using the Vocaloid voice synthesizer, and was shown singing and dancing alongside human performers at events including the Digital Content Expo and CEATEC in 2009; AIST later (around 2011) demonstrated more natural human-like walking. HRP-4C was primarily an AIST development carried out with industry collaborators including Kawada, and should be credited to AIST rather than to Kawada alone.
HRP-5P, shown by AIST in 2018, is a prototype aimed at heavy labor and hazardous-environment work to address Japan's aging-population labor shortage. It stands about 182 cm, weighs about 101 kg, and has 37 degrees of freedom, the most in the series. Using object-recognition and environment-measurement technology, it can autonomously perform construction tasks such as picking up a gypsum (plaster) board and screwing it to a wall. Like the earlier robots it came out of AIST's humanoid research line, in which Kawada Industries (now Kawada Robotics) has been a long-standing private-sector collaborator. The construction focus is a natural fit for a group whose core business is building steel bridges and structures.
Kawada occupies an unusual position in robotics: a company whose primary business is steel-bridge construction, yet which became one of Japan's most consistent builders of advanced humanoids over more than two decades. Its dual focus, research humanoids built with AIST on one side and the commercially deployed Nextage collaborative robot on the other, mirrors a broader Japanese strategy of using humanoid and bipedal locomotion research to feed practical factory and labor-shortage applications. Within the wider field of robotics, Nextage is frequently cited as an early example of a dual-arm cobot designed from the outset to share space with human workers, predating much of the later wave of collaborative and humanoid factory robots.