At Yaskawa’s newest plant, AI robots build robots and cook the canteen udon

Yaskawa Electric is using its AI-equipped MOTOMAN NEXT robots to assemble industrial robots at Robot Factory No. 5, its new plant at the Kitakyushu headquarters, and says their ability to retry failed screws on their own has raised screw-fastening success from 99% with conventional robots to more than 99.9%. Two of the robots also cook udon and soba in the plant’s staff canteen, as broadcaster RKB reported on September 16, 2026.

What does Yaskawa’s Robot Factory No. 5 make?

The two-storey building, in Kitakyushu’s Yahata-nishi ward, covers about 30,000 square metres, according to trade outlet Robot Digest. The ground floor assembles up to 1,500 industrial robots a month across 12 models; the upper floor makes up to 20,000 servo motors a month. Nikkei described it as a new “mother factory” running from servo production to final robot assembly under one roof. Nikkei and Robot Digest dated full operation to June 2026; RKB said July.

Counts of the robots on the floor differ by source. Robot Digest reported 73 robots, about 35 of them MOTOMAN NEXT units; Nikkei put the figure at about 100 robots, roughly a third AI-equipped. Robot Digest also reported that output per employee has roughly doubled.

How do AI robots improve screw fastening?

Screw fastening is the task Yaskawa chose to show. A conventional robot manages it about 99% of the time, which RKB noted means the line stops roughly once every few robots built, and a person has to redo the screw. The MOTOMAN NEXT units recognise a misaligned screw and retry it themselves. “The robot makes its own judgments in the area that a program cannot handle,” a section manager at the robot factory told RKB, putting the success rate above 99.9% and saying the load on maintenance staff and operators has changed markedly. Robot Digest reported that the plant manager plans to extend MOTOMAN NEXT to sealing, press-fitting and assembly.

The same camera-and-sensor stack is being tested outside robot assembly. RKB showed an AI robot using 3D sensors to read the creases and contours of a raw-material bag and cut it open without damaging the contents, a job Yaskawa pitches for food, beverage and ingredient-blending lines where people currently do heavy lifting.

What is the Yaskawa udon robot?

Yaskawa calls it a “yatai-style udon and soba cell,” after Japanese street-food stalls. Staff order on a touch panel; the robots take bagged noodles from a refrigerator, open the bag, heat the noodles, bowl them, add toppings and pour broth. Nikkei reported a press demonstration at the Factory No. 5 canteen on July 22, 2026, and said Yaskawa is using the canteen to build know-how for cooking robots. The canteen’s deputy manager told RKB the robots now handle hot work where staff risk burns.

What is MOTOMAN NEXT?

Yaskawa launched MOTOMAN NEXT in November 2023 as what it called an adaptive robot, combining vision, path planning and force sensing on one controller. On July 15, 2026 it announced an agentic robot system that uses Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 to plan tasks from broad instructions such as “sort these parts,” with MOTOMAN NEXT handling the motion. Two days earlier, Yaskawa and SoftBank reported a VLA model picking wire harnesses on the same robot. RKB’s demonstration followed that pattern: asked to move “something to write with” into a blue box, the robot picked up a ballpoint pen.

Why it matters: a robot maker running physical AI on its own assembly line produces the reliability figure buyers need — failure rate per task in production — rather than a demo success rate. RKB reported that Yaskawa’s medium-term plan to fiscal 2029 allocates ¥250 billion of investment over four years.