The University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics and Kawada Robotics, a subsidary of Kawada Technologies, Tokyo, Japan have inked a new Joint Industry Academia project collaboration looking to bring the latest advances in adapative whole body motion planning and Generative Artificial Intelligence to address reliability of industrial packaging and complex multi-contact manipulation tasks in real world settings.
The Kawada Group has expertise across a wide range of infrastructure and architectural projects, notably being responsible for several landmarks such as the Tokyo Skytree, Tokyo Gate Bridge, and Japan National Stadium. In addition, Kawada Industries generates an annual revenue of around 79.3 billion yen, reflecting its strong presence in the construction industry within Japan and are engaged in all phases of the construction process from structural design and manufacturing to on-site erection and maintenance. Kawada also has a proud history of innovating, including the design and construction of some of the iconic humanoid robots in Japan including the HRP series and Nextage bimanual systems.
The new two and half year long project, focusing on bringing the advances in physics informed Generative AI methods for motion adaption to improve reliability and robustness of industrial packaging process will be led by Professor Sethu Vijayakumar at the School of Informatics and Ippei Yoshida at Kawada Robotics. The contract signing was concluded in the Tokyo offices mid November 2025 with the group president Dr. Tadahiro Kawada.
New Kawada Robotics Project with School of Informatics to focus on novel Generative AI methods to make multi-contact packaging with advanced bi-manual Humanoid platforms more robust
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