The AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is a non-profit organization launching October 1, 2025, with a mission to integrate AI and robotics through open platforms and a global robot data ecosystem. With over 24 member companies including Toyota, Nissan, NEC, Fujitsu, and Mitsubishi Electric, AIRoA operates state-of-the-art infrastructure comprising hundreds of humanoid robots, GPU clusters, high-fidelity simulators, and a global-scale evaluation pipeline. The organization's technical work spans Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, multimodal learning, tactile-rich manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and robotics foundation models.
AIRoA's core initiative targets collecting one million hours of humanoid robot operation data across hundreds of robots to train what the organization describes as the world's most powerful VLA models. This data collection effort directly supports the development of robotics foundation models and addresses large-scale benchmarking challenges in the field. All datasets, trained models, and benchmarks are made available to the global research community as open resources, reflecting the organization's commitment to advancing robotics technology through collaborative development.
The organization provides an open evaluation platform enabling researchers worldwide to test their models on standardized humanoid robots through AIRoA's infrastructure. This platform supports work across multiple technical domains including high-fidelity simulation, sim-to-real transfer validation, and standardized benchmarking. Engineers working with AIRoA's platform will engage with technical stacks including ROS/ROS2, C++, Python, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, and PyBullet. The organization is led by Tetsuya Ogata and operates with a focus on addressing societal challenges including healthcare efficiency improvements and labor shortages through advanced robotics technology deployment.