HSR: a Toyota robot for disabled people at home that became a research standard

One arm to pick things up and open the curtains

Toyota announced the HSR (Human Support Robot) prototype in September 2012. Its aim was to help people with limited arm or leg mobility live on their own at home. Given a voice command or a tablet instruction, it picked objects up from the floor, fetched items from high places and opened curtains. The Japan Service Dog Association helped identify the needs, and the Foundation for Yokohama Rehabilitation Service ran in-home trials with people with limb disabilities in 2011. Sources differ on when the work began. A 2019 paper traces it to a 2006 hospital-support concept robot, while a SIGGRAPH blog post the same year says it started in 2010.

A robot loaned, not sold

In July 2015 Toyota announced a new HSR with a shorter arm and an omnidirectional base. It weighs about 37 kg. Instead of selling it, Toyota set up the HSR Developers’ Community and loaned robots to universities, research institutes and companies. AP reported that Toyota declined to give a price and said mass production was needed to bring it down. From RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, HSR was the Domestic Standard Platform for RoboCup@Home, and it was also the standard platform for the World Robot Summit service robot category. As of November 2018 it had been provided to 44 sites in 12 countries.

Easier to ask a robot than a person

In the 2015 AP story, Tadashi Hatakenaka of the Yokohama Rehabilitation Center said: “People feel more comfortable asking a robot to pick up after them than asking a human helper.” In 2017 the first in-home trial in North America took place at the home of Romulo Camargo, a U.S. Army veteran paralyzed from the neck down. HSR opened doors and fetched water bottles and snacks. In March 2019 a plan was announced to use up to 16 HSRs to help wheelchair users at the Tokyo 2020 Games.

A research standard before it was a product

HSR was never sold as a home product. Instead, many research teams used the same robot, and it became a shared base for research on domestic mobile manipulators. Toyota built the research community first, without disclosing a price. It is worth comparing with Stretch, which is sold as a research platform.

Before this robot goes on sale, who can use it first and prove what it is good for?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Whether Toyota still loans or supports HSR, and if the program ended, when
• How many units were built, and deployment figures after 2018
• Whether it was used at the Tokyo 2020 Games as planned
• Whether HSR is still the RoboCup@Home domestic standard platform in 2025–2026