Kawada Robotics

Kawada Robotics was set up on 1 April 2013 as the robot subsidiary of Kawada Industries, a Tokyo bridge and steel construction firm, under the Kawada Technologies holding company. It has capital of 100 million yen, a head office in Taito, Tokyo and a plant in Haga, Tochigi, and Naohito Shiroma is president. Employee numbers are not published.

The group's humanoid record goes back to the Japanese trade ministry's Humanoid Robotics Project of fiscal 1998 to 2002, in which Kawada built the hardware for the HRP series with the research institute AIST: HRP-2 in 2002, HRP-3 in 2006 and HRP-4 in 2010. These were research machines sold to labs, not products. The commercial outcome was NEXTAGE, an upper-body dual-arm robot on a fixed base released in 2011 for light assembly next to people; the company said in November 2025 it had passed 1,000 cumulative installations.

On 28 November 2025 Kawada Technologies announced it was restarting full-body humanoid development for factories and construction sites, refitting an old HRP-2 with new sensors, batteries and GPUs for trials at Kawada Construction's equipment centre and starting joint research with five Japanese universities. It described this as a long-term project with no product date, and no funding or sales targets were given.