Fujitsu announced on July 16, 2026, that it has begun exploring business collaboration with three of Japan's leading robotics manufacturers — FANUC, Yaskawa Electric, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries — to develop and deploy physical AI across manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare2,3,7.
The initiative centers on a collaborative control platform that bridges digital business systems with physical robots and equipment, integrating NVIDIA's open physical AI technologies4,5. The effort extends a full-stack AI platform that Fujitsu and NVIDIA unveiled in October 2025 to physical machines and on-site operations.
At the core of the announcement is "Fujitsu Kozuchi Physical OS," a software layer that connects enterprise systems — such as production management and electronic medical records — to robots from multiple manufacturers and allocates work across an entire site. Fujitsu described a four-layer architecture spanning business systems, coordinated control, physical machines, and AI/computing.
The platform will draw on several NVIDIA tools. Fujitsu said it will leverage the NVIDIA Cosmos global foundation model for socio-physical simulations, as well as NVIDIA Omniverse, the Isaac open platform, and the Newton physics engine for simulation-to-reality transfer, robot learning, verification, and optimization. Cosmos is incorporated as a world foundation model that predicts upcoming changes from on-site video and status data.
Each robotics partner brings distinct capabilities. FANUC integrated its ROBOGUIDE software with NVIDIA Isaac Sim in May 2026 and demonstrated a dual-arm robot folding T-shirts using GR00T N. A FANUC exhibited system upgraded from Jetson AGX Orin to Jetson T5000, reportedly improving AI computing performance by more than 7.5 times.
Yaskawa Electric has been selling the autonomous MOTOMAN NEXT robot since 2023 and brought a version equipped with NVIDIA GPUs as standard to market. The day before the Fujitsu announcement, Yaskawa unveiled a system combining MOTOMAN NEXT with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics ER 1.6. Yaskawa is also advancing ROS 2 compatibility.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries opened a physical AI development center in San Jose in May 2026.
Fujitsu plans to develop software platforms and hardware interfaces as a common foundation for physical AI, and to provide the sovereign collaborative control infrastructure as an open platform for participating companies and research institutions. The company also plans to progressively incorporate results of joint research with Carnegie Mellon University into Physical OS starting in fiscal 2026. Fujitsu's autonomous AI platform integrates its own Takane large language model alongside NVIDIA technologies.
Target applications span three sectors. In manufacturing, the platform will optimize production planning and enable autonomous adaptation to changing factory conditions. In logistics and retail, Fujitsu aims to automate material handling by combining logistics planning with real-time sales and inventory data. In healthcare, robots could automate the transport of pharmaceuticals and medical specimens and assist with patient reception and guidance.
The collaboration is framed against Japan's industrial pressures, including labor shortages driven by a declining birthrate and aging population, a decline in skilled technicians, and intensifying global competition. Japan's 2026 AI robotics strategy sets a target of deploying approximately 10 million units domestically by 2040 and aims to capture over 30 percent of the global market share, securing a ¥20 trillion market. Japan Robot Association data show 2025 robot orders rose 25.7 percent year-on-year to ¥1,045.6 billion, and production value rose 21.0 percent to ¥945.3 billion.
The initiative remains at an exploratory stage. Specifications and rollout timing for the common interface, as well as pricing and deployment targets, have not been disclosed. Each company will now begin building roadmaps for technology development and business expansion.
ANALYSIS The structure of the initiative — an IT integrator coordinating across competing robot OEMs via a shared middleware layer built on NVIDIA's simulation and AI stack — positions Fujitsu as an orchestration layer rather than a hardware competitor. The inclusion of all three major Japanese industrial robot makers on a single platform effort is notable given that FANUC, Yaskawa, and Kawasaki typically compete directly in factory automation.