Mitsubishi Motors Bets on Humanoid Robots to Rescue Japan's Factories

Mitsubishi Motors has signed a memorandum of understanding with Highlanders, a University of Tokyo-linked robotics startup, to jointly develop humanoid robots and explore mass-producing them at the automaker's Kyoto Plant starting as early as 2027. The two companies unveiled a jointly built prototype at a Tokyo event on July 9, and Mitsubishi Motors says it has already invested in Highlanders, with more capital expected to follow. It is the first agreement between a major automaker and a humanoid robotics developer that explicitly targets mass production, not just pilot testing.

The deal responds to a labor crunch squeezing Japanese manufacturing for years. Factory floors need workers who can lift, walk, inspect, and adapt to changing tasks, and Japan's shrinking, aging workforce increasingly cannot fill those roles. Mitsubishi Motors plans to deploy Highlanders' robots inside its own facilities first, building internal robotics expertise before scaling the underlying hardware for external customers.

Inside Highlanders' HL Human: What the Robot Can Actually Do

Highlanders' flagship platform, the HL Human, is built around 19 degrees of freedom distributed across jointed arms, a mobile torso, and articulated legs, giving it a range of motion aimed at general-purpose factory work rather than a single repetitive task. Its five-fingered hand can grasp objects up to roughly 3 kilograms, enough for common parts-handling and assembly duties. The robot walks autonomously at around 3 kilometers per hour while maintaining active balance control, and it perceives its surroundings through 3D stereo cameras and LiDAR. Layered safety systems, including collision detection, automatic braking, and proximity-based deceleration, let it work near humans without a caged-off zone. Highlanders has also built in Vision-Language-Action capability, letting the robot interpret natural-language instructions and translate them directly into physical tasks.

Why an Automaker, and Why Now

Mitsubishi Motors brings something Highlanders cannot easily build alone: decades of mass-production engineering, quality control, and mechatronics know-how, plus idle floor space at its Kyoto Plant that can be repurposed for robot manufacturing. For a young startup, that is the difference between a promising lab demo and an actual production line. For Mitsubishi Motors, deploying humanoids on its own floors first is a way to learn the operational realities, uptime, maintenance, and error rates before committing fully to building the machines at scale.

Our collaboration with Highlanders represents a challenge aimed at building a new industrial foundation in which humans and robots work together. By utilizing humanoid robots in our own manufacturing facilities and supporting the production of Highlanders products, we aim to leverage the outcomes of this collaboration to drive our growth and enhance corporate value.

— Takao Kato, Chairman and CEO, Mitsubishi MotorsJapan's Humanoid Race Is Getting Crowded

The tie-up lands amid a broader, government-backed push in Japan to catch up in physical AI. Tokyo's METI and NEDO have already committed roughly $2.3 billion this fiscal year toward a domestic multimodal foundation model for robots, built by a consortium called Noetra that includes SoftBank, NEC, Sony, and Honda. Separately, contractor Shimizu is testing a Unitree-based humanoid on construction sites for its own labor shortage. Globally, Highlanders and Mitsubishi Motors enter a field already crowded by Tesla's Optimus, China's Unitree, and U.S.-based Figure AI, all racing toward scaled humanoid deployment. Japan's pitch is different: automotive-grade reliability and manufacturing discipline over raw speed to market.

Detailed specifications and a firmer production timeline for the HL Human are expected later this summer, and the real test will not be the Tokyo demo stage but the shop floor. Humanoid robots have a long history of looking impressive in showcases and stumbling once asked to run eight-hour shifts alongside human coworkers. Mitsubishi Motors is effectively volunteering its own factories as the proving ground, a bet that could validate Japan's cautious, quality-first approach to humanoid robotics, or expose how far the technology still has to go.

Source: Nikkei Asia, 'Mitsubishi Motors to make humanoid robots for its own auto factories,' published July 10, 2026, 00:21 JST. Additional reporting from Automotive World, published July 9, 2026, citing Mitsubishi Motors' official newsroom release dated July 9, 2026.