AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is an organization dedicated to collecting large-scale real-world robot data, including data from humanoid robots, and advancing the development of generative AI foundation models for robotics.
AIRoA has been selected as a project operator for the development of a data platform for generative AI foundation models in robotics under the “Post-5G Information and Communication Systems Infrastructure Enhancement R&D Project” by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and NEDO. The project budget is 20.5 billion yen. Based on this platform, AIRoA is carrying out a project to collect approximately one million hours of humanoid robot operation data using more than 100 robots, and to develop a world-class Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model using that data.
The significance of this initiative lies not only in the scale of its real-world data and humanoid platforms. AIRoA aims to make datasets, trained models, benchmarks, and evaluation environments as open as possible, building a “Robot Data Ecosystem” that can be commonly used by researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Achieving this vision requires not only AI models, cloud infrastructure, and physical robots, but also a simulation platform capable of accurately reproducing robot behavior, sensors, contact dynamics, and surrounding environments, while enabling safe, reproducible, and continuous evaluation. By recreating a wide range of real-world tasks and failure scenarios in simulation and systematically validating software performance and safety, this platform accelerates research and development and improves sim-to-real performance.