AI Robot Association

The AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is a Japan-based non-profit organisation founded in 2025 and officially launched on October 1, 2025. It brings together more than 24 member companies - including Toyota, Nissan, NEC, Fujitsu and Mitsubishi Electric - to advance robotics by integrating artificial intelligence with robotic systems. Its stated aims include building a comprehensive robot data ecosystem and open platforms for robotics foundation models, directed in part at societal problems such as labour shortages and healthcare efficiency in Japan's ageing society.

AIRoA's work spans a set of technical fields: artificial intelligence and robotics integration, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, multimodal learning, tactile-rich manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, large-scale benchmarking, robot learning data collection, high-fidelity simulation, GPU computing infrastructure and humanoid robotics. The association operates research infrastructure that includes hundreds of humanoid robots, GPU clusters and high-fidelity simulators.

Central projects include an open evaluation platform that allows researchers worldwide to test their models on standardised humanoid robots; a robot data ecosystem targeting one million hours of humanoid robot operation data collected across hundreds of robots; trained VLA models released openly to researchers; and open benchmarks for robotics foundation models. Datasets, trained models and benchmarks are made available to the global research community, with an emphasis on standardised, reproducible evaluation. Further details are published at airoa.org.