FANUC and Hitachi team up to put learning robots into real production

FANUC and Hitachi team up to put learning robots into real production

30 September 2026: Hitachi and FANUC have announced a strategic partnership to commercialise what they call Physical AI: Hitachi's industrial AI, sold as HMAX Industry, running on FANUC industrial robots that carry AI of their own. Customer deployment is planned to begin in fiscal 2027 across both companies' global installed bases, and the work starts inside Hitachi's own factories.

Not yet independently verified. The partnership rests on FANUC's own release, with no second source. The Google details come from FANUC's May release alone. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Hitachi factories as Customer Zero

Hitachi calls its own plants "Customer Zero". The AI is trained there and keeps learning the production rules specific to each site, which is how the two companies say they will go beyond two approaches they name directly: imitation learning, and digital twins that exist only in simulation. Joint validation takes place at Hitachi manufacturing facilities in the Ibaraki region, with the goal of a Physical AI ready for real production by fiscal 2027.

The partners are tracking four measures: recognition accuracy, robot motion, takt time and quality effectiveness. They are also testing Hitachi's edge-AI semiconductor in combination with FANUC robots, so that some of the processing happens next to the machine.

Parts picking and changeovers come first

The initial tasks are picking parts of various shapes and handling changeovers when a line switches from one product to another. Both are named priorities because they address labour shortages and the loss of skilled know-how. The release says tasks such as parts handling, loading, assembly, changeovers and material transfer still depend on human judgement, and that is the gap the partnership is aimed at.

The target industries are broad: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, advanced materials, automotive, logistics, food, shipbuilding and agriculture.

Two very different balance sheets

Hitachi describes itself as working in four sectors plus a Strategic SIB unit, with fiscal 2025 revenue (to 31 March 2026) of JPY 10,586.7 billion, 606 consolidated subsidiaries and about 290,000 employees. Its core platform is Lumada.

FANUC reports consolidated net sales of JPY 857.8 billion for the fiscal year to 31 March 2026 and 10,040 consolidated employees. It made Japan's first numerical control system and servo for machine tools in 1956, and says it supports open platforms so developers can write robot control in environments they already know.

FANUC's president and CEO, Kenji Yamaguchi, describes Physical AI as AI that "perceives, reasons about, and acts in the physical world through robots and machines". Hitachi's president and CEO, Toshiaki Tokunaga, speaks of using it to "innovate manufacturing sites that support people's lives and industries".

The Google collaboration from May

In May, FANUC announced an enhanced Physical AI Robot System built with Google. FANUC says it has shipped more than 1,000 robots for Physical AI applications since it released the system at the International Robot Exhibition in December, and that demand is still accelerating.

That system uses Google Cloud technologies including Gemini Enterprise. At FANUC's New Product Open House Show, a demonstration showed an AI agent that interprets human instructions, recognises objects and operates collaborative and non-collaborative robots as one cell from natural-language commands. FANUC also said all of its robots, including the CRX collaborative series, will be fully supported on Intrinsic's enterprise platform, and that it takes part in Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics Trusted Tester Program.

FANUC's lineup in that release runs from a 3 kg payload robot to a 2.3-tonne payload robot.

Related on TrustList:

• Yaskawa builds a robot hub in Slovenia and pairs Motoman with Gemini
• euRobotics asks Brussels to challenge the US ban on foreign-made robots
• China's five-year plan puts AI-powered robots at its centre

Sources

• FANUC news release: strategic partnership with Hitachi on Physical AI, 30 September 2026
• FANUC news release: enhanced Physical AI Robot System with Google, 13 May 2026