Toyota Executive Vice President and CTO Hiroki Nakajima outlined the program at an investor event held by Toyota Motor Europe. The company plans to upgrade approximately 60 factories worldwide, alongside robotics equipment used throughout its manufacturing network.
The program covers approximately 400,000 existing robots across the broader Toyota manufacturing ecosystem. Around 150,000 are operated by Toyota and Toyota Group companies, with another 250,000 used by suppliers. The figure refers to the existing robotics fleet targeted for modernization, not 400,000 new humanoid robots, despite some early reports describing it that way.
Toyota also demonstrated ELEY, short for Embodied Learning robot for Enhanced Yield. The wheeled, dual-arm robot is being developed for manufacturing tasks that require manipulation and adaptation rather than fixed industrial automation.
ELEY learns tasks from human demonstrations and uses large behavior models to generate robot actions. Toyota demonstrated the system transferring parts between containers and folding fabric. According to reporting from the company’s European technical briefing, ELEY learned a T-shirt-folding task from approximately 1,500 demonstrations collected over two weeks.
Toyota plans to introduce the technology progressively into its own factories and major suppliers as production equipment is replaced. The company is also preparing to turn its robotics technology into a standalone business and eventually offer the systems to external customers.
