Yaskawa Electric Corporation (head office: Kitakyushu city, Fukuoka Prefecture; Representative Director and President: Hiroshi Ogasawara) has established AI Cube Inc. (“AI³“), a new company that will develop AI solutions for manufacturing and industrial robots. AI³ has also signed a strategic alliance with XCompass Ltd. (head office: Tokyo; CEO: Akira Sato), an AI venture company that develops algorithms for artificial intelligence and offers consulting services for accelerating a development of AI solution.

Aiming to “Achieve revolutionary industrial automation” as stated in our long-term business plan Vision 2025, Yaskawa Electric unveiled a new solution concept “i³-Mechatronics” in October 2017. Yaskawa Electric aims to offer new solutions by adding AI technologies to our globally competitive components.

The new company AI³ will take advantage of the strengths of Yaskawa that can collects its operational big data through the components such as servos, AC drives, and industrial robots and accelerate the development of AI technology that uses such big data.

AI³ will aim to offer new AI solutions by leveraging AI technology for customers’ task at production sites. Its target will be with particular focus on solutions in areas which tie in directly to production efficiency, for example image processing for appearance inspections, time series analysis for the failure prognosis, and optimization for reducing takt time.

To corresponding the entire market of manufacturing, AI³’s precondition for developing and supplying AI solutions is open innovation and it is moving forward its initiatives for collaborating with various partners. As such, AI³ has signed a strategic alliance with XCompass Ltd., a venture company that has an excellent track record in AI solutions for the manufacturing industry. In addition to building technical cooperation to accelerate the speed of development for introducing AI in manufacturing, AI³ will collaborate in various ways, including the consignment of duties, in pushing forward the development of various solutions, commencing with anomaly detection which will be one of the strengths in manufacturing. In advancement of the alliance, a capital tie-up*¹ with Yaskawa Electric has been in place with XCompass since October 2017.

*¹: For details, please visit the link below (news release dated November 1, 2017)

　　https://www.yaskawa-global.com/newsrelease/news/10079

・Company name: XCompass Ltd.

・Date established: April 2015

・Location: 5F AMINAKA Kudan Building, 1-14-17 Kudan-Kita, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, JAPAN

・Description of business: Consulting on machine learning, data analysis services, development of AI platforms, development of new algorithms etc.

While impact on Yaskawa’s consolidated results from the matter discussed in this news release is expected to be minor, we will promptly notify you should it become clear that there will be impact on our future results.

Contact:

Corporate Communications Div.

YASKAWA Electric Corporation

E-mail: kouhou@yaskawa.co.jp