Kawada NEXTAGE

NEXTAGE is the dual-arm industrial humanoid that Kawada introduced in 2009, alongside the HIRO research platform, and it is still in production today — an unusually long run for a robot of this kind. The company's own timeline dates the award-winning breakthrough to 2012, the spin-off of Kawada Robotics and the NEXTAGE OPEN research variant to 2013, and the current NXA hardware generation to 2018. The specification catalogued here is that NXA generation. The layout is a torso rather than a walking machine: 15 axes, six in each arm, two in the neck and one at the waist, mounted on a wheeled pedestal that brings the whole system to 1690 mm tall and about 150 kg. The robot itself is 620 mm wide, 840 mm tall and weighs 36 kg. Payload is deliberately modest — 2.5 kg rated per arm and 5.0 kg for both together, 3.0 and 6.0 kg at maximum — because the design target was never brute force but working next to people. Every one of the 15 axes uses an actuator rated below 80 W, which is what allows a risk assessment to clear the robot for fenceless operation, and electromagnetic brakes on the shoulders and elbows stop the arms dropping when power is lost. Vision is built in rather than bolted on: a stereo camera in the head measures distance in three dimensions, and each arm carries its own hand camera for close work. Position repeatability is +/-0.03 mm, with the arm settling within 0.3 seconds at a 2.5 kg load. The CXA control box splits the job between two operating systems — QNX Neutrino handles motion control, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise the image recognition and user interface — and offers 16 digital inputs and 16 outputs, two gigabit Ethernet ports and ten USB ports. Kawada added a third-party-certified functional safety option with ISO 10218 safety-rated monitored stop in 2019, and a restyled variant, NEXTAGE Fillie, followed in 2022.

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