Panasonic pursues humanoid production… Hitachi and Fanuc join forces to develop robots

The Nippon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) reported on the 1st that Panasonic has begun research on an artificial intelligence (AI) model that will serve as the brain that moves the robot, with the goal of producing humanoid robots (humanoids) by 2029.

The company is first pursuing the development of robots to be used on factory production lines or warehouses.

The company emphasized that it ensures the safety of humanoid operation by installing batteries from Panasonic Energy, which have never had a fire accident so far.

Hitachi Manufacturing announced a partnership in the field of physical AI with Fanuc, which is considered the world's No. 1 industrial robot company.

First, the two companies decided to demonstrate the work precision of robots to be deployed at Hitachi's Ibaraki Prefecture factory site.

Hitachi is independently developing 'on-premise AI' semiconductors that run on individual terminals such as robots. The plan is to verify the effectiveness of this chip by mounting it on a robot produced by Fanuc.

A Hitachi official told Nikkei, "We want to help solve our customers' manpower shortages and technology transfer challenges by automating tasks that used to depend on the experience of skilled workers through AI."

The use of robots is increasing not only in large corporations but also in Japanese small and medium-sized businesses.

'J-HRTI', in which five companies, including Yamazen, a mechanical trading company, and Tsumura, an herbal medicine company, have begun joint research to enable AI for robots to learn human movements.

The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that while jointly carrying out robot development, which requires enormous costs, robots for simple tasks such as sorting will be put into the field as early as this year.