AI Robot Association (AIRoA)
Tokyo non-profit association of Japanese industry and academia collecting open robot data and building robot foundation models, backed by NEDO.
The AI Robot Association (AIRoA; in Japanese, Ippan Shadan Hojin AI Robot Kyokai) is a Tokyo non-profit general incorporated association founded in December 2024 to build open data and foundation models for AI-driven robots in Japan. It held its public launch press conference at Waseda University on 27 March 2025. Its offices are in Tokyo Ryutsu Center Building A, Heiwajima, Ota-ku, Tokyo.
Leadership. The chairperson is Tetsuya Ogata, professor at Waseda University's Faculty of Science and Engineering. The board includes Yutaka Matsuo (University of Tokyo), Tadahiro Taniguchi (Kyoto University), Yoshitaka Ushiku (NexaScience and OMRON SINIC X), Genki Sano (co-founder and CTO of Telexistence), Hiroshi Bito (Toyota Motor Corporation Frontier Research Center), Eriko Nogi (Matsuo Institute) and Yousuke Okada (ABEJA CEO); University of Tokyo president Teruo Fujii is special advisor and Tatsuya Matsushima of the University of Tokyo is chief technology officer.
Members. At launch the association had 22 member companies, including Toyota Motor, Nissan, KDDI, NEC, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric and SoftBank's SB Intuitions. Its website now shows several dozen members, among them Panasonic, Hitachi, DENSO, Toshiba, KIOXIA, Sakana AI and ABEJA. Regular membership costs JPY 10 million per year, associate membership for small robot or AI developers JPY 1.2 million and supporting membership JPY 5 million.
Activities. The association's stated activities are collecting, storing and publicly releasing the data needed to develop robot foundation models; developing and openly sharing foundation and task-specific models; measuring and publishing the efficiency gains from AI robots; and evaluating and publishing AI-robot safety. A recruitment posting describes backing of JPY 20.5 billion from NEDO and a goal of collecting one million hours of robot operation data with hundreds of robots in factories, warehouses, homes, hospitals and construction sites to train vision-language-action (VLA) models, together with an open evaluation platform for standardised humanoid robots.
Outputs. Published work includes:
- AIRoA MoMa Dataset: 25,469 real-world mobile-manipulation episodes (about 94 hours) recorded on Toyota's Human Support Robot (HSR), with synchronised RGB images, joint states, six-axis wrist force-torque signals and robot internal states, a two-layer annotation scheme of sub-goals and primitive actions, and about 6.6 percent failure episodes. It is released on Hugging Face in LeRobot v2.1 format. The work acknowledges support from GENIAC, the generative-AI programme run by METI and NEDO.
- YUBI (Yielding Universal Bidigital Interface): a finger-aligned handheld gripper for ergonomic, scalable collection of bimanual dexterous manipulation data, presented as an alternative to pistol-grip UMI-style devices.
- Research papers on continuous reasoning and visual evidence budgets for VLA models.
AIRoA also runs the Domestic General-Purpose Robot Development Competition, which selected four teams for its refinement phase in September 2026, and organises workshops at IROS 2026 and CoRL 2026.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
AIRoA MoMa Dataset
Open mobile-manipulation dataset of 25,469 episodes (~94 h) on Toyota HSR with RGB, joint states, 6-axis wrist force-torque and hierarchical task labels, in LeRobot format.
YUBI bimanual data-collection gripper
Finger-aligned handheld gripper mapping human finger motion to jaw motion for ergonomic, scalable bimanual dexterous manipulation data collection.
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Contact AI Robot Association (AIRoA)
WEBSITE
https://www.airoa.orgHEADQUARTERS
Japan
Company Facts
Founded
2024
Primary Role
Industry Association
Company Size
-
Primary Region
Asia-Pacific
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Grant / Non-profit
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- AI Robot Association (AIRoA)
- AIRoA
- 一般社団法人AIロボット協会
- robot foundation model
- open robot dataset
- vision-language-action models
- mobile manipulation dataset
- Human Support Robot
- GENIAC
- NEDO
- bimanual data collection gripper
- general-purpose robot competition
- Industry Association
- Research Institute
- Cloud & Data
- Control & Software
- Education & Research
- Research Platform
