Toyota
Canvas Category OEM : Automotive
Toyota will lead the future mobility society, enriching lives around the world with the safest and most responsible ways of moving people. Through our commitment to quality, ceaseless innovation, and respect for the planet, we strive to exceed expectations and be rewarded with a smile. We will meet challenging goals by engaging the talent and passion of people who believe there is always a better way.
Assembly Line
BurnBot Secures $20M in Series A Funding to Prevent Destructive Wildfires with Mechanized Vegetation Management
BurnBot, announced it has raised $20 million in financing to expand its mechanized vegetation management and fuel treatment solutions to prevent destructive wildfires. The round was led by ReGen Ventures, with participation from Toyota Ventures, AmFam Ventures, Convective Capital, Blue Forest Asset Management, Skip Capital, Overture Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and Pathbreaker Ventures.
To amplify prescribed fire capacity, BurnBot developed the RX, a mechanized prescribed fire system that precisely deploys fire within an enclosed chamber, cooling the land as it moves. “Our technology is a force multiplier, enabling small crews to treat areas 10X faster and more efficiently. We know that fire is an effective and ecological way to manage fuel buildup and we designed the RX to operate with minimal smoke and escape risk, so it’s safe for use year-round, even near communities and critical infrastructure. This investment will allow us to expand our technology development and operations, and we’re excited to make a positive impact,” said Waleed “Lee” Haddad, Co-Founder and CTO of BurnBot.
Toyota Material Handling transforms production operations with Ericsson Private 5G
Toyota Material Handling’s major production complex in Columbus, Indiana, U.S., is enjoying increased productivity, faster deliveries to customers and boosted employee morale since the operational launch of a private 5G network at the facility, designed and installed by Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and channel partner, STEP.
Toyota Material Handling management reported the benefits following the decision to replace on-site Wi-Fi solutions with Ericsson private 5G products and solutions, including the indoor-connectivity-focused Radio Dot System. Business-critical operations at the almost 200,000 square feet warehouse are now run exclusively over the on-site 5G private network leveraging CBRS spectrum, with no disruptions or connectivity loss reported since its operational launch in November of 2023.
Meet Punyo, TRI’s Soft Robot for Whole-Body Manipulation Research
Toyota Material Handling Europe (TMHE) and Gideon enter strategic cooperation for new automated solutions
By implementing Gideon’s AI-powered autonomy software stack on Toyota vehicles, the market will get solution to some of the unsolved automation problems through significantly shortened project implementation timelines, focusing primarily on collaborative case picking for retail order fulfilment and autonomous truck unloading and loading.
Foundation Models for Materials Discovery: Our Investment in Orbital Materials
Fortunately, innovations in artificial intelligence have led to the emergence of foundation models, which are trained on vast amounts of data and leading to models that can be used across numerous applications. Those foundation models have the potential to enable inverse design, a method of material development that expedites the process by using the specific required properties as an input and generating the new material design as an output. This approach has the potential to revolutionize material development across industries, which is why we are excited to announce Toyota Ventures’ investment in Orbital Materials through our Frontier Fund.
The team has trained a 3D foundation model, named LINUS, for crystal structures and small molecules. Instead of screening millions of materials in hopes of finding one with a specific property, LINUS generates a material based on a given property in a single calculation. To do this, the team has developed a new version of the “transformer”, a model typically used for natural language processing, to allow the model to learn the relationships between the 3D structures of materials and their properties. Advanced materials that absorb and catalyze are crucial in various industries such as carbon capture, sustainable fuels, water treatments, biofeedstock upgrades, and battery recycling.
Toyota Motor Corporation Collaborates with READY Robotics to Introduce Sim-to-Real Robotic Programming in Industrial Manufacturing Using NVIDIA Omniverse
READY Robotics, a pioneer in operating systems for automation and robotics, is collaborating with Toyota Motor Corporation and NVIDIA to bring a significant leap forward in industrial robotics. Toyota will employ READY ForgeOS in tandem with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a robotics simulator developed on NVIDIA Omniverse, to build a state-of-the-art simulated robotic programming environment for its aluminum hot forging production lines.
This groundbreaking collaboration is set to enhance safety and efficiency in Toyota’s manufacturing processes. Typically, programming robotic systems for forging necessitates that the metal parts remain hot during programming, presenting significant safety challenges. By integrating NVIDIA Isaac Sim — an extensible application developed on the Omniverse platform for simulating, developing and testing robots — with ForgeOS, programming can now be accomplished seamlessly in a simulated environment, eliminating the risks associated with hot parts.
ZymoChem Closes $21M Series A Round Led by Breakout Ventures with Investments from lululemon and Toyota Ventures
ZymoChem, creators of the world’s most carbon-efficient bio-manufacturing platform, closed a $21 million Series A round. The investment is led by Breakout Ventures with participation from new investors including lululemon athletica, inc. and Toyota Ventures, and existing investors including GS Futures, KdT Ventures, and Cavallo Ventures. By pairing this financing with existing revenues from commercial partnerships and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, ZymoChem will launch its first high-performance material and advance its first partnered product to commercial scale.
Burro closes $24M
Burro, a Philadelphia-based autonomous mobility company, closed a $24 million Series B co-led by New York City-based growth equity firm Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, along with existing investors S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cibus Capital. As part of the round, Brian Rich, managing partner with Catalyst Investors, and Kaz Kikuchi from Translink Capital, will join the company’s Board.
Burro is an autonomy company building the future of work outdoors. Founded in 2017, the company began with a mobility platform designed to help customers meet rising wages and a shrinking workforce. Burro has more than 300 robots working as harvest assist robots in nurseries and permanent crops, where they tow trailers autonomously, patrol depot yards, and serve as a platform and physical API for a growing set of technology partners.
Momenta leads Series A investment round for Agtonomy, joined by Doosan Bobcat North America and Toyota Ventures
Momenta, the leading Industrial Impact venture capital firm, announced today that they have led the Series A funding round for Agtonomy, a leading software and services company specializing in advanced autonomous and AI solutions for agriculture. The $22.5m round was joined by strategic investors Doosan Bobcat North America, Inc. and Toyota Ventures.
Toyota Outlines Future Production Processes
The new strategy is rooted in the basic principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS), which includes a willingness to do things “for the benefit of someone other than yourself” and a “human-centered” approach to manufacturing. “What caught my attention the most was seeing see the famous genchi genbutsu (real place, real facts) now being done via video,” notes Obara. “Toyota engineers designed a vest to hold a camera, so remote people would not need to be on site to see it all.”
Toyota’s next-generation EVs will be built upon a new modular structure in which car bodies are divided into three sections: front, center and rear. The center section will house solid-state batteries, which offer faster charging and longer range than conventional batteries. Giga-casting is one of the new production technologies that will make these modular structures possible. Currently, the rear section of the Toyota bZ4X EV is made with 86 sheet metal parts and 33 press processes.
“Whereas a typical changeover might take 24 hours and require a large crane, giga-casting molds, which weigh more than 100 tons, leads to even greater time loss,” says Shingo. “Our new approach to giga casting divides molds into two types: general-purpose molds that remain mounted on the machinery and specialized molds whose shape differs by car model. During a replacement, only the compact specialized molds detach themselves automatically from the general-purpose molds.” With these just-in-time mold changes—replacing only what is needed, when it is needed, in the quantity needed—Toyota is aiming to bring lead times down to 20 minutes or less.
AM Batteries Closes $30M Series B led by Toyota Ventures to Accelerate the Commercialization of its Dry Battery Electrode Technology
AM Batteries, a pioneer in the field of lithium-ion dry-electrode technologies, today announced it closed a $30M Series B in an oversubscribed funding round led by Toyota Ventures. New investment combines strategic corporate support from Porsche Ventures and Asahi Kasei, with financial investment from RA Capital Management - Planetary Health, Wilson Sonsini, and Industry Ventures. The round also includes existing investors such as Anzu Partners, TDK Ventures, Creative Ventures, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, Foothill Ventures, and Zeon Ventures.
As more sustainability-focused gigafactories dot the world in places like Asia, Europe, and the United States, efficiencies in battery manufacturing are paramount. With strong commercial traction from tier-one battery producers, AMB’s funding from a robust set of strategic and financial investors will help the company develop and drive the commercialization of dry powder coating technology and equipment for low-cost lithium-ion battery manufacturing.
Toyota and Redwood Materials Agree to Battery Recycling, Materials Procurement
Progressing closer to the goal of battery ecosystem circularity, Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) and Redwood Materials announce an expanded recycling agreement that aims to create pathways for automotive batteries used in Toyota’s electrified vehicles that have reached the end of their life. The plan also includes an agreement for Toyota to source Cathode Active Material (CAM) and Anode copper foil from Redwood’s recycling activities for Toyota’s future, new automotive battery production. The agreement builds on the collaboration with Redwood announced last year for battery collection and recycling of Toyota’s hybrid and battery electric vehicle batteries.
Toyota’s automotive battery recycling needs are expected to grow substantially in the coming years as more of its electrified vehicles, such as first-generation Prius models introduced more than 20 years ago, reach the end of their lifecycle. With a large amount of Toyota’s retiring fleet of electrified vehicles being in California, Redwood’s Nevada recycling facility will support Toyota’s North American supply chain, which will improve sustainability, and help to enhance operational improvements across the TMNA enterprise for a closed-loop battery ecosystem. Toyota’s battery lifecycle ecosystem is forecast to include the recycling, remanufacturing and repurposing of the nearly five million operating units, building toward Toyota’s ultimate goals of carbon neutrality for its global operations by 2035 and carbon neutrality for its vehicles by 2050.
“They listened to everything we asked for.” – How Toyota helped shape the Stratasys F3300 FDM 3D printer
In the building of the F3300, Stratasys started from scratch rather than riff off the architecture of past FDM systems, integrating a tool changer that allows the user to deploy one of four extruders at a time. Tools can be changed within around 14 seconds, giving the user more flexibility in scenarios of extruder redundancy – one extruder can pick up the slack of another that has broken down – while also allowing them to print multiple colours in one part and even incorporate two different resolutions too. That latter feature was one Stratasys had been looking to achieve from the very beginning.
Stratasys went to the industrial leader in tool changer manufacture, ATI, and commissioned the company to build a custom product for the F3300. Since Stratasys expects users to do multiple tool changes in a build, they needed repeatability, reliability, and accuracy in the XY dimensions.
Per Martin, Stratasys’ tool changer is delivering on the promise. Martin works in Toyota’s TILT Lab and is responsible for delivering tooling, jigs, and fixture applications to his colleagues on the production lines. Around 5,000 cars come off these production lines every day, with Toyota harnessing FDM technology to produce manufacturing aids in materials such as PA12 CF and ULTEM 9085. Martin estimates the F3300 to be between 46-50% faster while maintaining the same resolution and accuracy as the F900.
Idemitsu and Toyota Announce Beginning of Cooperation toward Mass Production of All-Solid-State Batteries for BEVs
Idemitsu Kosan Co.,Ltd. (Idemitsu) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) announced today that they have entered into an agreement to work together in developing mass production technology of solid electrolytes, improving productivity and establishment a supply chain, to achieve the mass production of all-solid-state batteries for battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Through this collaboration, the two companies, which lead the world in the fields including material development relating to all-solid-state batteries, seek to ensure the successful commercialization of all-solid-state batteries in 2027-28―as announced at the Toyota Technical Workshop in June 2023―followed by full-scale mass production.
Toyota Improves Engine Assembly
As examples of how the plant is contributing to the company’s goal of carbon neutrality, Matsuoka points to a manual assembly line that uses karakuri—material handling mechanisms that do not rely on electricity—and a casting line that has eliminated the need for large-scale equipment. By using karakuri mechanisms, engineers have been able to improve lifting operations so that they can be done with a single touch. Since parts can be moved without applying a large amount of force, safety issues are also solved, meaning that covers are no longer needed.
Although casting requires a large amount of energy, improvements have reduced annual CO2 emissions by approximately 1,800 tons, or the equivalent of annual emissions of 600 households. These changes were brought about when Toyota introduced its next-generation engine design. To realize both high fuel efficiency and high power output, engineers concentrated on improving the engine’s thermal efficiency. This required improvements in the cylinder head cooling functions. Specifically, this means that the water jacket, through which coolant passes, must pass extremely close to the combustion chamber and exhaust port, where temperatures are highest.
Toyota Research Institute Unveils Breakthrough in Teaching Robots New Behaviors
The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced a breakthrough generative AI approach based on Diffusion Policy to quickly and confidently teach robots new, dexterous skills. This advancement significantly improves robot utility and is a step towards building “Large Behavior Models (LBMs)” for robots, analogous to the Large Language Models (LLMs) that have recently revolutionized conversational AI.
TRI has already taught robots more than 60 difficult, dexterous skills using the new approach, including pouring liquids, using tools, and manipulating deformable objects. These achievements were realized without writing a single line of new code; the only change was supplying the robot with new data. Building on this success, TRI has set an ambitious target of teaching hundreds of new skills by the end of the year and 1,000 by the end of 2024.
🧠 Toyota and Generative AI: It’s Here, and This is How We’re Using It
Toyota’s initial goal in 2016 was to engineer a resilient cloud safety system, and that led to the development of Safety Connect, a service powered by Drivelink from software company Toyota Connected North America (TCNA). The Safety Connect service is designed to leverage key data points from the vehicle to identify when a collision has occurred and send an automatic notification to call center agents. Should the driver become unconscious, telematics information can provide a more complete picture of the situation, enabling agents to contact authorities faster when it’s needed most.
Vehicle maintenance has also been a focus of AI-driven enhancements. Connected vehicles have hundreds of sensors, and we have been using data from these vehicles to build machine learning models for the most common maintenance items, including batteries, brakes, tires, and oil, and are currently investigating dozens of other components, using daily streaming data from millions of connected and consented vehicles. This suite of predictive maintenance models will help make customers aware of potential maintenance needs prior to component failures, so they can enjoy more reliable mobility experiences.
Why Toyota Production System is Not Understood
🧠 Toyota Research Institute Unveils New Generative AI Technique for Vehicle Design
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) today unveiled a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technique to amplify vehicle designers. Currently, designers can leverage publicly available text-to-image generative AI tools as an early step in their creative process. With TRI’s new technique, designers can add initial design sketches and engineering constraints into this process, cutting down the iterations needed to reconcile design and engineering considerations.
TRI researchers released two papers describing how the technique incorporates precise engineering constraints into the design process. Constraints like drag (which affects fuel efficiency) and chassis dimensions like ride height and cabin dimensions (which affect handling, ergonomics, and safety) can now be implicitly incorporated into the generative AI process. The team tied principles from optimization theory, used extensively for computer-aided engineering, to text-to-image-based generative AI. The resulting algorithm allows the designer to optimize engineering constraints while maintaining their text-based stylistic prompts to the generative AI process.
Daimler Truck, Mitsubishi Fuso, Hino and Toyota Motor Corporation conclude an MoU on accelerating development of Advanced Technologies and merging Mitsubishi Fuso and Hino Motors
Daimler Truck Holding AG (“Daimler Truck”) Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation (“MFTBC”), Hino Motors Ltd. (“Hino”) and Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) today concluded a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on accelerating the development of advanced technologies and merging MFTBC and Hino. Daimler Truck, MFTBC, Hino, and Toyota will collaborate toward achieving carbon neutrality and creating a prosperous mobility society by developing CASE technologies (Connected / Autonomous & Automated / Shared / Electric) and strengthening the commercial vehicle business on a global scale.
Joby and Toyota Expand Partnership with Long-Term Supply Agreement for Key Powertrain and Actuation Components
The agreement builds on the long-standing partnership between Joby and Toyota, which has seen the two companies collaborate on a wide variety of projects to support the production and assembly of the Joby aircraft, including advising on the design of Joby’s pilot production line in Marina, CA. Toyota is also Joby’s largest external shareholder, having invested around $400 million in the Company.
How Toyota Factory Works with Zortrax 3D Printers
Toyota factories in Poland use a Zortrax M300 Plus 3D printer to make manufacturing jigs on demand. According to Toyota, investment in the 3D printing technology in automotive can pay for itself within one year. The key advantage of the Zortrax 3D printing technology, according to Toyota engineers are its agility.
“We have been using 3D printers for years now. They were already here when I came to work at Toyota four years ago.”, says Kondek. According to him, jigs that are 3D printed in automotive industry today used to be made by a separate tooling division equipped with CNC machines and other subtractive manufacturing tools. Fabrication of more demanding designs were simply outsourced to external subcontractors.
“Obviously, using such tools severely limited what we could do design-wise. Every time we thought about a new jig, we had to think twice about whether it could be fabricated or not. 3D printing in automotive sector solve this problem.”, explains Kondek. He adds that currently over 95% of the 3D printed jigs made at Toyota factory are manufactured in the LPD technology. The rest is 3D printed in other 3D printing technologies.
Solvent-Free, Dry-Electrode Manufacturing for Batteries: Our Investment in AM Batteries
Electrode fabrication is the first stage in battery manufacturing, and the conventional process is lengthy and costly. It involves a “wet coating” that most commonly includes N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) as a solvent, followed by drying and compression. The drying process requires a large physical footprint — the equivalent size of a football field — and NMP is inherently toxic, so recovery is required. Both the drying and recovery processes require high operating temperatures and result in high energy consumption and operating costs, equivalent to approximately 32% of the total cost of battery manufacturing and 50% of the energy consumption.
AM Batteries’ process does not require energy-consuming evaporation or solvent-recovery. AM Batteries’ dry-electrode manufacturing technology uses an electrostatic spray deposition technique: active materials (cathode/anode) are electrostatically charged, deposited onto metal foil current collectors, and then processed to their final state. AM Batteries has found that this dry process results in 1) a 40% reduction in capital required for electrode equipment investment; 2) a 50% reduction in electricity usage of the plant; and 3) reduced cell cost. In addition, AM Batteries’ electrodes also offer the potential for fast-charging and higher-energy density batteries.
How to Maximize Your Production: Line Analysis
Toyota Indiana is the first TMNA manufacturing site to implement Invisible AI technology at scale with an initial deployment of 500 edge AI devices in 2022. The partnership supports Toyota’s core philosophy of continuous improvement for safety, quality, and operational efficiencies. Invisible AI technology helps Toyota better understand manual assembly operations, which accounts for a majority of the work performed in manufacturing.
Invisible AI’s technology uses edge AI devices with a built in NVIDIA Jetson module, 1TB of storage and a high-resolution 3D camera to track all floor activity – without using the cloud or any bandwidth. This self-contained AI device processes body motion data to identify potential for high-stress injuries and prevent simple defects in real-time, which generates millions in savings for customers. The software is entirely anonymized and privacy-centric by design and can be deployed in 60 seconds without any coding or engineering expertise, allowing customers to scale to thousands of cameras with ease. As an NVIDIA Inception and Metropolis partner, Invisible AI continues to push the boundaries of computer vision.
Invisible AI Partners with Toyota to Install Ground-breaking Computer Vision Platform Across North America
Invisible AI, a company building state-of-the-art AI solutions for manufacturing, today announced a partnership with Toyota Motor North America (TMNA), as the company integrates Invisible AI’s innovative computer vision platform across its 14 North American manufacturing operations.
Toyota Indiana is the first TMNA manufacturing site to implement Invisible AI technology at scale with an initial deployment of 500 edge AI devices in 2022. The partnership supports Toyota’s core philosophy of continuous improvement for safety, quality, and operational efficiencies. Invisible AI technology helps Toyota better understand manual assembly operations, which accounts for a majority of the work performed in manufacturing.
Slamcore raises $16 million to deliver low-cost spatial understanding
Slamcore, a pioneer in vision-based location and mapping for robots, autonomous machines and consumer electronics products, has raised $16 million in Series A capital that will allow the business to rapidly capitalize on its proven technology which combines AI with consumer-grade cameras, sensors and processors to solve the complex challenges of mapping and navigating for a wide range of autonomous machines and devices.
The funding round was led by ROBO Global Ventures and Presidio Ventures who invested alongside Amadeus Capital, Global Brain, IP Group, MMC and Octopus. Strategic investors Samsung Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and Yamato Holdings also joined the round.
Tool and Die Software: Our Investment in Atomic Industries
Tool and die making has been one of those stubborn pieces that has yet to find its place in the factory of the future mosaic. This is largely because tool and die making is an outdated, time-consuming, and labor-intensive process that has eluded innovation. With a vision of making mass manufacturing as agile and distributed as software development, Atomic also wants to drive business model innovation by converting tooling from a capital expenditure to an operating expenditure. Focusing first on injection mold design, the team plans to expand into applied automation in fabrication and testing of manufacturing tools. Die casting, stamps, and metal injection molds are also on the roadmap.
Symbio Helps Automakers Rev Up Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Production With Smarter Assembly Line Robots
Automation from Symbio is designed to solve car manufacturing pain points. “Engineering teams at Toyota are leveraging Symbio’s technology, expertise and best practices of artificial intelligence (AI) to increase efficiency, improve quality and reduce ergonomic hazards,” said Symbio CEO and co-founder Max Reynolds. “Cars are changing. Manufacturing processes are changing. We’re proud to be working with Toyota to help them adapt for a competitive advantage.”
One application Toyota leverages is Symbio’s moving line technology where robotic assembly is done as vehicles are carried down an active production line in the plant. Symbio software is also used to perform tasks, such as wax application, without making stops.
How Toyota kept making cars when the chips were down
But not all carmakers have suffered equally. While rival OEMs (or original equipment manufacturers, as automakers are known) stumbled, Toyota kept production largely on target until May. The company has said factory closures owing to chip shortages would cause a shortfall of 20,000 vehicles in Japan—less than 1% of Japanese production in fiscal 2021. Toyota’s North American production, meanwhile, hummed along at 90% of capacity for the year through June. That prolonged productivity propelled the company to a rare victory: In the second quarter, it was the No. 1 automaker by sales in North America, marking the first time since 1998 that GM hasn’t held the top spot.
Toyota’s handy navigation throughout the shortage is more than just good luck: It’s good management. Over the past decade, Toyota has overhauled the way it oversees its supply chain—implementing hard lessons it learned a decade ago after the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami devastated swaths of Japan’s industrial heartland. Those gradual reforms prepared the company to ride out the current chip crisis, executives say. And just as the success of Toyota’s “just in time” (JIT) manufacturing model led automakers the world over to imitate the company in the 1980s, the company’s new advances may spawn another wave of imitation.
Unlike many of its rivals, Toyota essentially stockpiles chips. That’s a deviation from JIT, which dictates that supplies reach the production line only when they are needed. (Stockpiles occupy valuable space on the factory floor, as well as on the company’s books.) In practice, Toyota’s suppliers do the actual stockpiling. Like all automakers, the company relies on a multitude of components that contain semiconductors, such as smart displays or audio systems. Toyota requires suppliers of those components to maintain up to a six months’ buffer supply of chips dedicated to Toyota orders—just in case.
Missing Chips Snarl Car Production at Factories Worldwide
Semiconductor shortages may persist throughout the first half as chipmakers adjust their operations, researcher IHS Market predicted on Dec. 23. Automakers will start to see component supply gradually ease in the next two to three months, China Passenger Car Association, which groups the country’s largest carmakers, said Monday.
Chipmakers favor consumer-electronics customers because their orders are larger than those of automakers – the annual smartphone market alone is more than 1 billion devices, compared with fewer than 100 million cars. Automaking is also a lower-margin business, leaving manufacturers unwilling to bid up chip prices as they avoid risking their profitability.