在日本现场，已见成效。

Balance customer satisfaction and working conditions amid peak-time serving loads and labor shortages.

About 3,000 units deployed to about 2,100 stores, including Gusto, Shabu-Yo, and Bamiyan, by December 2022.

At Gusto: lunch-peak turnover +7.5%, staff steps −42%, clearing time −35%.

Industrial sites facing labor shortages needed to reduce manual inter-building transport.

Melco Mobility Solutions, a Mitsubishi Electric group company, ordered about 100 units for deployment at industrial sites in Japan.

Aims to automate inter-building transport with a 300 kg, all-weather, slope-capable robot.

A shrinking workforce and retiring veteran technicians left too few people for inspection rounds.

Since August 2025, Spot patrols 5 routes and about 100 points, reading gauges and using thermal imaging.

Expected to save about 650 inspection hours per year.

High-SKU, small-lot e-commerce shipping meant long walking distances and staff shortages.

Up to 110 + 15 FlexSwift-series units at two Chiba sites (as of June 2025).

Daily steps about 20,000 → 6,500, pickers 60 → 20, order lines per hour up 50%.

Walking a large warehouse to find items was holding productivity down.

Since 2018, 216 robots at East Japan FC (Chiba) bring whole shelves to workstations.

Outbound capacity 4x, storage 2x, and 40% less labor across the warehouse.

Staff spent about 3 hours a day mopping floors.

An 18-day trial on two floors of a nursing home.

Estimated 90 staff-hours a month freed and cleaning costs cut 67% (¥103,000/month).

Chronic staff shortages, with room-service requests clustering after 10 PM.

From April 2025, the robot rides the elevators to deliver across floors and announces arrival through the in-house phone system (PBX).

Carries orders for up to 4 rooms per trip, saving labor on late-night room service.

Evaluate whether humanoids can support airport ground handling amid labor shortages.

A trial started at Haneda Airport in May 2026 and is planned to run through 2028.

Step-by-step validation for ground handling such as loading and unloading baggage and cargo.

With 664 beds, 1,300+ outpatients a day and no pneumatic tube system, staff spent about 1–3 hours a day carrying specimens and drugs.

In full use since June 2025 on three routes: ER/wards and internal-medicine outpatients to the central lab, and pharmacy to the outpatient chemotherapy room.

Over 330 staff-hours saved per year; about 90% of staff said they gained time for their core work.

Make inspections of electrical equipment and on-board train equipment, now done by inspectors, more advanced and efficient.

From April 2025 at the substation and depot near Motosumiyoshi Station, testing meter reading, thermal visual checks and ultrasonic gas-leak location.

Runs field and office work in parallel; aims for AI-based automatic entry into inspection sheets and optimized inspection intervals.

Filming for as-built drawings of repeatedly renovated facilities suffered blur and gaps on unstable ground, forcing reshoots.

At the JR Shin-Koiwa Station south-exit building project (Tekken–Takenaka JV), a camera-equipped Spot patrolled a set route to film footage turned into point clouds.

Filming time cut by up to about 30%; point clouds overlaid on BIM to check clashes with existing structures in advance.

Many units have run for 50+ years, so maintenance must get better at preventing age-related failures.

On May 24–28, 2026, with Tohoku Enterprise, one Spot patrolled the wastewater-treatment area autonomously, including at night, collecting equipment data.

Autonomy stability, data accuracy and anomaly detection are being evaluated toward a phased rollout decision.

Labor shortages and new truck-driver work-hour rules made automating in-plant logistics urgent.

Over 400 units run across several plants, with up to about 200 robots per system.

Unmanned transport from receiving through picking to machining areas, with less risk of crossing forklifts and tow tractors.

Palletizing was already automated, but moving pallets to the next step still needed workers.

Triggered by equipment PLC signals, the VNP15 carries finished pallets to the truck berth and refills the palletizer with empty pallets.

Destinations are assigned automatically, so the whole transfer runs with no operator instructions.

Keep station maintenance sustainable amid labor shortages and even out variation in human inspection results.

From September 10, 2025 at Tokyo Station, a Unitree Go2-W fitted with TechShare's autonomy unit, cameras and 3D LiDAR patrols set routes.

Records the state of passages and equipment on autonomous routes; rollout to other Tokyo-area stations is under consideration.

Hiring difficulties, an aging cleaning staff and rising minimum wages were eroding the economics of store cleaning.

Contractors sign for and run the robots: Whiz i on ceramic floors, wet-mopping Phantas on plastic-tile floors, now across 120 stores.

Cleanliness maintained at lower cost, contractor margins improved, and families with children respond well.

A public correspondence high school with students of varied ages and backgrounds wanted a place where students feel at ease.

LOVOT was placed in the student break room, where students hold it between classes and it stays nearby during teacher meetings.

Break-room use rose 25-fold; infrequent attendees came in to see it, and a selectively mute student greeted a teacher while holding it.

Manual forklift replenishment shifted parts across several lanes, so location records needed operator input.

At the head plant, the VNP15 takes parts from double-stacked steel pallets (4 deep × 12 wide) and feeds a chute, triggered by equipment PLC signals via RCS.

14 cameras detect part movements in real time and update locations automatically, enabling fully unmanned operation.

Winter snow clearing and removal face a looming worker shortage and rising costs.

Under a December 2025 partnership, the Yarbo autonomous snow robot was tested at Sapporo City Hall from January 28 to February 6, 2026.

Validates safe autonomy on snow and ice, obstacle avoidance, route design and battery use toward real-world rollout.

Shorten delivery lead times and broaden the assortment for the Tohoku and Hokkaido regions.

HaiPick Climb System is the core equipment at the new Tohoku IDC, which consolidates Kaunet's logistics, controlled together with other equipment by Hitachi's WCS.

Plans storage of up to 270,000 SKUs, about 40% higher productivity than the average of three main sites, and 50–70% less stocktaking work.

Fitting the motor, battery, and rear suspension and tightening bolts upward from under the body took six stations.

Workers set the units on a pallet; high-speed vision tracks the body in real time while robots marry the units and tighten bolts upward.

Six stations consolidated into one, handling gasoline, e-POWER, and EV models on the same line.

Painted bodies and bumpers must be checked for dirt, nibs, and craters, plus color, film thickness, and gloss.

On the Ariya line, several robots with zebra lighting and cameras inspect the body in about 600 zones; contact-probe robots measure color, thickness, and gloss.

Detects dirt down to 0.3 mm; defects are sent to inspectors' phones for checking and repair.

Trim and final assembly involves many parts and relies mostly on manual work.

Instrument-panel robots since launch; in 2015 the power-drive unit fitting and grommet plugging were robotized too.

Robots now handle three tasks in the trim process.

Drivers moving finished cars to the yard walked about 8 km a day back to the line.

Slides under the car, lifts all four wheels, and drives autonomously with centimeter-level RTK-GNSS, adjusting to wheelbase and ride height; fleet-managed since September 2023.

Replaces driver moves and the walk back with robotic transport.

Finished cars must be moved about 1.4 km from the plant to the company's wharf.

A LEAF-based autonomous tow vehicle that reads lane lines and curbs with cameras and laser scanners and tows up to three cars; introduced in December 2016 after 1,600+ test runs.

Plant-to-wharf transport of finished cars runs without a driver.

Returnable containers of different shapes and stacking patterns arrive mixed, and three people unloaded them.

Two depalletizing robots running MujinOS with 3D vision (announced September 2026).

From three staff to none, handling about 5,000 boxes a day.

About 23,000 items a day across 56 SKUs ship in bread crates, each needing a shipping label.

A MOTOMAN-HC10 cobot senses four crate types to supply, discharge, and stack them; a MOTOMAN-MPP3S delta robot applies 3,000 labels an hour. Part of a METI demonstration program (FY2017).

Staff 5 → 2, productivity 2.5×, payback 1.8 years.

People unpacked tea leaves (up to 25 kg) from cartons, fed them in, and weighed them.

Three robots and peripherals fully automate opening cartons, lifting out inner bags, cutting, feeding, and clearing empties.

Saves 1,870 hours a year in feeding and 521 hours in weighing.

High-mix boards must be loaded into testers and fixtures, judged pass or fail, and sorted.

A dual-arm robot loads boards into the existing testers and fixtures, judges them by image recognition, and sorts them (2019).

Needs no wiring, so it can be moved to suit the product mix.

Touch panels on panel computers are tested by pressing with a stylus and checking the response.

A UR3 cobot presses the panel with a stylus and checks the response; three months from introduction to operation.

Productivity +31%, post-test staff 2 → 1, payback about one year.

Finished goods go to shipping and mask magazines to the SMT line, both moved between processes.

Nine AMRs plant-wide: three for shipping and one for mask magazines. Linked to MES, the nearest free AMR is dispatched.

MES and AMRs handle dispatching from request to pickup automatically.

Boxes of 25 wafers were carried by cart between buildings and to upper floors.

AMRs and three cobots automate the handoff through inter-building pass boxes and upper-floor sliders (front end).

Lead time cut from 60 to 42 days.