Kachaka Pro

Kachaka Pro is the business version of Kachaka, the transport robot built by Preferred Robotics — a Tokyo company founded in November 2021 as a subsidiary of the deep-learning lab Preferred Networks. The consumer Kachaka went on sale in May 2023; the Pro model followed on 19 February 2024, with a heavier tow rating, a longer-range laser scanner and an interface aimed at staff rather than households. The machine is deliberately unimpressive to look at: a 124 mm-tall wheeled slab that drives underneath a matching Kachaka Shelf or Kachaka Base, latches on and pulls it. It navigates by SLAM, so no magnetic tape, reflectors or floor markers are installed; a site is mapped by driving the robot around once, and destinations are set from a phone, tablet or PC. Preferred Robotics markets same-day commissioning without an integrator, and that — rather than the mechanics — is the product. The trade-off is scale. Thirty kilograms on hard floors (twenty on carpet), a 5 mm step limit and a 2-degree slope limit put Kachaka Pro far below conventional AGVs and warehouse AMRs. It is designed for the layer beneath them: dental surgeries moving instrument trays, restaurants running plates, laboratories and factories shuttling parts between workstations in aisles as narrow as 550 mm. Since September 2025 a Kachaka Fleet Manager add-on has coordinated several robots at once, handling passing in narrow corridors and dispatching the best-placed unit; it requires a dedicated mini-PC controller and an annual software licence. The robot is sold at an open price, with the manufacturer advertising the class as costing under one million yen — an order of magnitude below a typical industrial AMR. In April 2026 Preferred Robotics announced it had taken the largest share of AMR units shipped in Japan, a claim that says more about how many small sites can now afford a transport robot than about tonnes moved.

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