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The humanoid Japan chose for mass production has 19 joints and lifts 3 kg — and its brain is still being built

Mitsubishi Motors will put a humanoid robot on an unused engine line at its Kyoto plant, with production targeted for early 2027. The machine is HL Human, built by Highlanders, a University of Tokyo spin-off founded in May 2023. Read the specification sheet next to the announcement and the two do not obviously match. HL Human, unveiled on 30 June 2025, has 19 degrees of freedom — four per arm, the rest in legs and torso — and grips objects of up to 3 kg, with a five-finger hand offered as an option. For comparison, the humanoids shipping out of China in volume today carry roughly twice the joint count. Highlanders presents the number as a decision rather than a limit: dexterity and reliability over strength, on a body that walks autonomously at 3 km/h, maps its surroundings with a 3D stereo camera and LiDAR, and brakes automatically on collision detection. Instructions are given in plain language and interpreted by a vision-language-action stack. The memorandum of understanding signed on 9 July 2026 is unusual in the industry: it is the first time a carmaker has agreed to mass-produce another company's humanoid. Mitsubishi contributes mass-production engineering, quality assurance, durability and safety design, and factory operations - exactly the disciplines a four-year-old startup cannot buy. The first robots go to work inside Mitsubishi's own plants, moving parts and assembling engines, before either company sells them elsewhere. Japanese press reports put planned capacity at up to 1,000 units a month; neither official release confirms that figure, or a price. The part that is easy to miss sits on Highlanders' own website. The company now describes its hardware as a data-collection loop for Kepler, its foundation model for physical intelligence - and Kepler is labelled "v1.0 - in development". Its target is a 10-billion-parameter world model trained on vision, force, tactile, teleoperation and simulation data, planning at about 5 Hz while a reflex layer runs at 500 Hz. The training cluster, named HISUI, is quoted at 640 NVIDIA B300 GPUs across 80 nodes and 24 petabytes of storage. Every one of those figures carries the word "expected". The company's stated data target - 26 million hours of real-world data - is for 2027 alone. So the timeline reads in two directions at once. The body is a known quantity, already through a beta programme that opened in September 2025 and an early access programme in Q4 2025, and it is now heading for a factory line with a 2027 date on it. The intelligence meant to run it is a specification, not a product. Mass production originally promised "within 2026" has become "early 2027", and the first customer will be the manufacturer's own assembly hall - which, for a robot that has to prove itself before anyone else buys it, may be the point.