Yaskawa puts MOTOMAN NEXT on Toyota GR kart frames, robot inspects and fixes its own welds
Yaskawa Electric said in a news release on Oct 28 that it and GAZOO Racing, Toyota Motor's motorsport division, have put an AI welding system into production on GR KART pipe frames at the Gamagori GR KART Workshop since September 2026.
The MOTOMAN NEXT robot reads the frame's condition, welds, then checks and corrects its own seams using camera images, welding sound and process data, work that previously needed expert welders.
Yaskawa Electric said in a news release on Oct 28 that it has jointly developed an autonomous robot production system with GAZOO Racing (GR), the motorsport division of Toyota Motor, and that the system has been running on GR KART frame production at the Gamagori GR KART Workshop since September 2026.
The robot recognises the condition of each pipe frame, including assembly state and joint gaps, decides the welding conditions, welds, and then inspects and corrects the seams itself. Yaskawa said AI analyses camera images, welding sound and other process data for the inspection step. The system runs on MOTOMAN NEXT, Yaskawa's robot with an onboard GPU. The company said the work moves beyond verification to a customer's live line and lowers production cost while making quality more consistent.
The project builds on the SFA (Sequence Freezing Arc) welding process the two companies developed in 2024 for race-car roll cages, which Yaskawa said cut roll-cage lead time from two to three weeks to three days.
MEKAWIRE context: this is the first customer production line for MOTOMAN NEXT that Yaskawa has named since its July tie-up with Google DeepMind, and it lands while robot profit is under pressure (H1 robotics profit down 43%, see our Yaskawa H1 explainer). Yaskawa did not give unit numbers, cycle times or prices.