Yaskawa promised five adaptive robots. The smallest one has no page to buy it from.

When Yaskawa announced the Motoman NEXT series in November 2023, it called it the industry's first industrial robot line able to judge a situation instead of replaying a taught path, and it named the lineup precisely: five models with payloads of 4, 7, 10, 20 and 35 kg, on sale from December 2023. The American launch in September 2024 repeated the same five and added two collaborative arms, NHC12 and NHC30. The catalogue looks different today. Yaskawa America's NEX series listing, checked on 6 September 2026, shows four robots: NEX7, NEX10, NEX20 and NEX35. There is no NEX4 tile, and the product address the series URL pattern would give it returns a 404 error page rather than a data sheet. The gap matters more than one missing tile. Adaptive behaviour — vision, force sensing, deciding what to do with a part that is not where it should be — is worth most on small, fiddly work: electronics assembly, laboratory handling, packing awkward little objects. That is the 4 kg class. A lineup that starts at 7 kg starts above the applications the technology was sold on. What the absence means is not stated anywhere. Yaskawa has published no withdrawal notice for the NEX4, and the model may still exist in other regions or as a special order; a product page can also vanish in a website rebuild. Until the company says otherwise, the honest reading is narrow: as of today, a North American buyer who wants the smallest adaptive Motoman has nowhere on Yaskawa's own site to start. Our catalogue profile of the NEX10, the middle size of the same family, records the same finding in its availability field.