Toyota Research Institute · research humanoid
Punyo
A torso-and-arms research robot covered in air-filled bladders and tactile fabric, aimed at future home and care help. It has no legs or mobile base. TRI is a US-based Toyota unit; country set to Japan for Toyota.
- Price
- —Not published
- Height
- —Not published
- Weight
- —Not published
- Payload
- —Not published
- Speed
- —Not published
- Battery
- —Not published
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Why it matters
Soft, huggable humanoid upper body that lifts objects using its arms and chest, not only its hands.
Real-world use
No customers or deployments reported yet.
Maker
Toyota Research InstituteCompany · founded 2016 · Los Altos, California, United StatesToyota subsidiary; launched with $1 billion over five years.
What it has been shown doing
We checked public videos and press for Punyo and found no clear demo of the skills we track yet.
Public attention
How much public attention Punyo gets, from open data.
- No Wikipedia article of its own yet
- 2 news stories from reputable press listed on this page
Measures how much people read and write about a robot, not how good it is. Measured 2026-10-13; same method for every robot. How it is measured
What’s inside
The parts the company has talked about publicly.
- Movement
- Stationary
- Actuators & motors
- Two rigid robot arms on a torso frame with a waist actuator (supplier not named).
- Hands
- 'Paw' grippers made of one high-friction latex bubble with an internal camera tracking a printed dot pattern to estimate force.
- Sensors & vision
- Air-filled bubbles on the arms with pressure sensors to detect external forces; in-paw cameras.
- Materials & build
- Compliant soft covering on hands, arms and chest; each arm bubble adds about 5 cm of compliance with adjustable stiffness.
- AI & software
- Diffusion policy trained on human demonstrations; example-guided RL with adversarial motion priors; plan-guided RL using a model-based planner instead of teleoperation.
- Other details
- Upper-body (static) research platform for whole-body manipulation.
Lineage
Every Toyota Research Institute humanoid in order.
Toyota Partner Robot (walking type)2004Retired
Toyota Partner Robot (violin-playing)2007Retired
Toyota Partner Robot (running humanoid)2009Retired
Human Support Robot (HSR)2012Research
Kirobo2013Retired
T-HR32017Research- No public photo yetWe only show photos we're allowed to useCUE (first generation)2018Retired
- No public photo yetWe only show photos we're allowed to useCUE32019Retired
CUE62022Research- Punyo2024Research
CUE72026Research
Toyota Research Institute also makes 1 machine and 1 vehicle. See every Toyota Research Institute robot
Watch Punyo
Made, sold and where
Unit counts are usually company figures; analysts often disagree.
- Price
- Not published
- How to get one
- No official buying page found
- Built
- Research robot at Toyota Research Institute; not for sale.
News
The latest 2, newest first. Summaries are ours; tap through for the original.
- Spectrum profiles TRI's soft Punyo
TRI aims Punyo at whole-body handling of big, awkward objects and help for older adults.
IEEE Spectrum - TRI unveils Punyo soft humanoid
Upper-body robot covered in air-filled pads for whole-body manipulation.
The Robot Report
Sources
Figures come from the maker. Every link below backs something on this page.
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