Toyota advances in the development of robots to help people

Toyota has partnered with the company PFN to accelerate the development of its new human assistance robots.

Toyota and Preferred Networks (PFN) have reached an agreement to research and develop assistance robots side by side to help people with their tasks. To carry out this work, the platform of the Human Support Robot (HSR) created by the Japanese brand will be used.

Thanks to this agreement, research into assistance robots will receive a strong boost so that they can be offered in less time. Progress in this sector has been clear, since they are no longer used only in industry: there are now robots capable of providing medical and logistics assistance.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot of work ahead, so it is still necessary to ensure that they become integrated into people’s lives and are capable of making decisions to respond correctly to certain situations.

For this reason, thanks to the experience both companies have in this field, Toyota and PFN will develop new assistance robots. The two companies hope they will be able to learn in residential environments and, based on that learning, acquire the ability to carry out various operations that make daily work easier.

Toyota will hand over its HSR robots and both companies will develop them

Toyota will transfer several HSR robots to PFN and, over the next three years, the companies will work on developing them. Thanks to this alliance, the two entities will share the data collected and their advances with each other so that each can freely use them to optimize how the robots operate. In this way, the development of these mechanized assistants will be faster and simpler.

Toyota has been working with robots for 15 years

Nobushuko Koga, Director of the Exploratory Research Center at Toyota, commented: “Since around 2004, Toyota has been developing assistance robots that help people with disabilities or the elderly, starting from the idea of coexisting with humans and helping them in their daily lives.”

“In 2012 we developed the Toyota HSR, which has a basic robotic platform that helps it operate autonomously. So far, the Toyota HSRs have been used in research and development programs at 49 organizations in 13 countries, including Japan, and have earned numerous accolades as a robotic platform. With the aim of eventually developing service robots that meet the needs of our customers, we are delighted at the prospect of collaborating on research and development with PFN, which can boast first-class artificial intelligence technologies,” Koga concluded.

PFN already presented a cleaning robot in 2018

Meanwhile, Toru Nishikawa, President and CEO of PFN, stated: “Since our founding in 2014, PFN has relied on deep learning to develop intelligent devices for automobiles and industrial robots. At CEATEC Japan 2018, we showed a robot capable of cleaning a room in a completely automated way. We applied deep learning technologies to create an HSR that could pick up and place undefined objects, design its own operating plan, and respond to human instructions.”

“The Toyota HSR is an exceptional robotic platform. Thanks to this joint research and development project with Toyota, which are the creators of the HSR, we hope to accelerate the development of the functions needed to use robots in human residential environments. Our goal is to achieve the practical deployment of assistance robots for the first time in the world,” Nishikawa added.

Robotic functions will have many more applications, as Hyundai demonstrated at CES with a car with robotic legs. We will have to wait to see the results of this collaboration, but one thing is clear: human assistance robots are closer than any of us think.