Toyota Motor announced a sweeping manufacturing transformation on September 18, 2026, committing approximately ¥1 trillion annually starting in 2028 to deploy 400,000 self-developed robots across roughly 60 plants worldwide. The initiative underscores a shift toward human-robot collaboration rather than labor replacement, as the automaker integrates advanced automation into factories undergoing renovation and rebuilding.
The ELEY Robot: Learning Through Observation
The centerpiece of Toyota’s plan is ELEY (Embodied Learning Robot for Enhanced Yield), a 50-kilogram wheeled humanoid featuring a two-fingered gripper and mobile base. Unlike traditional bipedal humanoids, ELEY is designed to work alongside human workers on factory floors, using vision systems and advanced learning algorithms to autonomously acquire fine motor skills by observing production tasks.
In a demonstration conducted at Toyota’s European headquarters in mid-September, ELEY learned to fold T-shirts with near-perfect accuracy after approximately two weeks and 1,500 training iterations. The robot’s design—with wheels instead of legs and a compact two-finger hand—reflects a pragmatic approach prioritizing stability and dexterity for tasks requiring gentle contact, such as folding and assembly work.
A Global Skill-Transfer Network
Toyota plans to distribute the robots strategically: 150,000 units to Toyota’s own factories and 250,000 to group-affiliated companies. More significantly, the company intends to create a closed-loop skill-transfer system by sharing robot training data across its global factory network. This approach would allow robots at different facilities to rapidly acquire identical skills and, as systems mature, enable robots to teach operational methods to newly hired employees.
The strategy leverages Toyota‘s manufacturing expertise, particularly the knowledge of approximately 18,000 veteran technicians known as “takumi,” or master craftsmen. By converting decades of accumulated expertise into transferable digital data, Toyota aims to distribute manufacturing knowledge efficiently across all 60 plants worldwide—a task that would be impractical through traditional apprenticeship alone.
Human-Robot Collaboration, Not Replacement
Executive Vice President Yuki Nakajima emphasized that the goal is to build a world where robots and humans coexist, not one where robots replace humans. Rather than eliminating workers, ELEY is intended to handle repetitive or physically demanding tasks while freeing employees for higher-skill work and enabling knowledge transfer between generations of workers.
The robots represent an evolution of Toyota’s earlier developments, including the Human Support Robot (first shown in 2012) and subsequent mobile manipulators. The new generation, powered by Large Behavior Models (LBM) developed by the Toyota Research Institute, can perceive their surroundings, learn autonomously, and adapt to varied operational scenarios—capabilities beyond traditional industrial robots that execute only pre-programmed motions.
Strategic Timing and Future Implications
The deployment timeline is deliberately tied to factory renovation cycles rather than immediate implementation. This approach allows Toyota to integrate new infrastructure—power supplies, wider aisles, and updated work standards—during rebuilds, avoiding the constraints of retrofitting robots into operating facilities.
From a competitive perspective, observers note that the vast quantities of high-quality operational data available from Japanese manufacturing floors could represent a unique advantage as global competition in Physical AI technology intensifies. The ¥1 trillion annual investment signals Toyota’s commitment to a long-term strategy, with cumulative spending likely to reach substantial figures if sustained beyond 2028. This initiative is expected to benefit Toyota’s supply chain partners and automation-related industries across the sector.
