AI technology, which has primarily developed in digital spaces, is now being applied to real world scenarios. “Physical AI” is a field of AI technology where AI is trained to understand physical laws and act autonomously and it will play a key role in solving various real-world challenges, such as in autonomous driving and smart factories. It is attracting significant attention as a potential means of helping with Japan’s worsening labor shortage and improving industrial productivity.
However, current physical AI applications are mainly limited to structured environments with defined pathways like manufacturing sites or logistics warehouses. In residential homes and offices, where human movements are less predictable and object arrangements frequently change, it is difficult to for AI to assess spatial dynamics, making current solutions impractical. Furthermore, in environments where large numbers of people and robots must work together, cooperation is currently difficult because the AI cannot understand the intentions behind others’ movements.
This new technology is based on Fujitsu’s Computer Vision technology, primarily used for human flow analysis in commercial facilities and abnormal behavior detection in crime prevention, as well as its digital AI technology, including the Fujitsu Kozuchi AI Agent which autonomously carries out tasks with human counterparts. It is part of the research efforts of the Spatial Robotics Research Center which Fujitsu established in April 2025 to step up its research toward realizing a new society where humans and robots coexist.