SoftBank and Yaskawa to collaborate on physical AI for the office - The Robot Report

SoftBank Corp. and Yaskawa Electric Corp. have announced a collaboration to develop "physical AI" for social and office robotics, combining Yaskawa’s mobile manipulator technology with SoftBank’s AI and connectivity infrastructure. Physical AI is defined as technology enabling robots to analyze sensor and camera data through AI to perform flexible, complex physical tasks and multi-tasking capabilities, moving beyond conventional robots designed for single, specific functions. This initiative aims to address Japan’s demographic challenges, such as a shrinking workforce, by creating robots capable of flexible decision-making in complex environments like offices, hospitals, and schools. The partners have developed an office use case involving a virtual building management system that centrally manages facility data, office supplies, and robot operations. SoftBank provides AI-RAN communications infrastructure, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and a vision-language model (VLM) to generate task instructions, while Yaskawa contributes its MOTOMAN NEXT mobile manipulator and a vision-language-action (VLA)