Toyota expanding Robotics Research in Europe

Mobility goes beyond cars
24/09/2019
The Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) provides researchers with an open innovation platform for research, development, and field testing in a real environment. Through the Developer’s Community, we are opening collaboration to research organizations to accelerate technological advances and growth thanks to the HSR.

A more inclusive and sustainable society

Toyota believes that mobility goes beyond cars. At Toyota, freedom of mobility is important, whether you are 1 or 100 years old. In pursuing its vision of “Mobility for All”, Toyota is committed to support the creation of a more inclusive and more sustainable society through mobility in which everyone can challenge their impossible. Next week Toyota will show its Human Support Robot (HSR) to the academic and researchers’ community in Europe at IROS in Madrid from October 1st-5th. Toyota Engineers will also present the HSR research platform in a series of talks.

Improving life quality

The HSR, one of Toyota’s mobility concepts developed within our goal to provide freedom of mobility for all, is part of the Toyota Partner Robots family. It reflects our commitment to enriching lives of Communities with a focus on nursing and healthcare, short-distance transport and home-living. As a compact mobile manipulator with a folding arm, it can pick up objects up off the floor and retrieve objects from shelves. It performs a variety of other tasks to improve the quality of life of elderly people or people with disabilities
“Toyota Motor Europe (TME) R&D Robotics significantly contributes to Toyota’s global research in specific areas of robotics such as perception thanks to Europe’s advanced capabilities in computer vision. We believe that HSR brings a real contribution to researchers and can help accelerate technological advancements in robotics. We are thrilled to expand our collaborations with additional European research organisations.”
Gerald Killmann, Vice President R&D at Toyota Motor Europe

Supporting research and testing

Through the HSR Developer’s Community launched in September 2015, Toyota has been offering its HSR open innovation platform to partners throughout the world. Participating research organizations do not need to develop the actual robot nor the software for the robot’s basic operations. They can focus on developing future ideas and applications by testing their technology and algorithms in a real environment with ease. There are already 44 partners in 12 countries using the HSR. In Europe, TME is also supporting 5 research universities located in Germany, UK, France and The Netherlands*.

This is just the beginning!

The HSR has already been adopted as a standard platform for international robot competitions such as the RoboCup@Home (Opens in new window) and the World Robot Summit (WRS).

To find out more about the HSR development and Toyota’s other robotics-related project, visit https://www.toyota-global.com/innovation/partner_robot/robot/ (Opens in new window)

* List of research universities in Europe:

 

Country

University

Topic

1

The Netherlands

Eindhoven University of Technology

Health-care oriented service robots

2

Germany

University of Bremen

Cognitive robot for human support

3

Germany

Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences

Domestic service robots

4

UK

University of Oxford

Autonomous service robots

5

France

University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard

Assisted living environments with service robots

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