en.Wedoany.com Reported - FANUC has reduced the time for robots to perform "imitation learning" of human actions from 60 hours to 4.8 hours, approximately one-twelfth of the original time. Kenichiro Abe, Managing Executive Officer of the company, revealed this achievement during a speech on the second day of "AWS Summit Japan 2026" held on June 26, and indicated a stance to accelerate the development of physical AI using the AWS cloud infrastructure.
FANUC has a track record of approximately 70 years in machine tool controllers (NC) and about 50 years in robotics. Over 1.2 million FANUC-manufactured robots are operating in factories worldwide. In recent years, the company has collaborated with technology companies such as NVIDIA and Google to promote the application of physical AI, which uses AI to control physical devices. Abe pointed out that in an era where securing a workforce is challenging, physical AI, which replaces humans in production activities, is indispensable for companies to maintain international competitiveness.
To drive robots with physical AI, it is necessary for the base model to learn various actions. One example Abe cited is the manipulation of soft objects (such as clothing), which is difficult to achieve with traditional rule-based control. FANUC enabled the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model to master this action through imitation learning of human movements. Previously, learning took 60 hours on local GPUs, but this was reduced to 4.8 hours by utilizing the "Amazon EC2" GPU instance "P5". In addition to learning on real robots, parallel learning in virtual space is also employed simultaneously.
Abe stated that the company will combine industrial robots with physical AI to address the issue of Japan's declining labor population, and expressed a willingness to expand collaboration with startups and other companies to this end.
Yasuhiro Koshi, Managing Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services Japan (AWS Japan), positioned physical AI as "the key to solving Japan's social challenges and driving industrial growth," and stated that AWS will support its development from both the cloud and edge. AWS Japan launched a "Physical AI Development Support Program" in January 2026, offering up to $6 million for domestic companies.
One of the selected companies for this program, Omron Sinic X, is exploring the automation of "experiments" in research and development. Yoshitaka Ushiku, Vice President of Research at the company, pointed out that while the research and development cycle is accelerating with the advent of generative AI, the experimental phase has not yet benefited from this, becoming a bottleneck. He stated: "Robots are not meant to replace humans, but to expand human creativity."
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