Toyota makes robotics a company-level unit under its production chief from January

Toyota will create Toyota Robotics on Jan. 1, 2027, a company-level unit that reports directly to top management and pulls together robotics know-how, people and functions now spread across the company. Takefumi Shiga, executive officer and Chief Production Officer, will lead it alongside his current posts, Toyota said on Nov. 5 in its list of organizational changes. Toyota calls robots "an important pillar of future business."

The first market for that business is Toyota's own production lines. Shiga already heads the Monozukuri Engineering division that Toyota set up in July to gather its manufacturing engineering, and the release says the new unit will start "from the problems and needs of the manufacturing floor" to deploy, put into practical use and commercialize robots. In September, at an investor briefing at Toyota Motor Europe, vice president and CTO Hiroki Nakajima said Toyota would invest ¥1 trillion a year from 2028 to renew 60 existing plants and bring in robots running physical AI, with Large Behavior Models from the Toyota Research Institute, Car Watch reported. The group operates 400,000 robots: 150,000 at Toyota and its group companies and 250,000 at suppliers.

Research folds into development the same day

The same reorganization closes two research-side bodies. The Frontier Research Center moves into the Advanced Technology Development Company and the Digital Software Development Center, so that research "is not kept inside an independent organization," and the Carbon Neutral Development Center moves into the Powertrain Company.

Toyota's wording reaches past the plant. It wants robots in society as partners "that stay close to people" rather than ones that take people's jobs, and it gave the unit a mandate to create "new value for a society where people and robots coexist."

In September, Nakajima spoke of Toyota Robotics as a team set up to bring robots into the plants, under a leader who already ran manufacturing engineering. From January it reports directly to top management, with commercialization in its brief.