ugo unveils Japan-built Nova semi-humanoid ahead of 2027 production

ugo has unveiled ugo Nova, a wheeled dual-arm semi-humanoid designed and manufactured in Japan, with mass production planned for 2027.

The Tokyo company developed Nova for manufacturing, warehouses and other human workspaces. The platform combines two 7-DoF arms with an articulated waist and mecanum-wheel base, supports up to 4 kg per arm and 10 kg using both arms, and is designed for around six hours of continuous operation. ugo’s product specifications list NVIDIA Jetson Thor as the onboard computer for local AI inference.

Nova is also designed as a data-collection and model-validation platform. Cameras are built into the head and hands, while arm control runs at 100 Hz. Operators can use bilateral or VR controllers to record synchronized video, joint states, torque, end-effector positions and control commands for robot-learning datasets.

The robot forms part of ugo Physical AI Fabric, a stack combining Nova and other data-collection hardware with ugo Data Factory for dataset preparation and ugo Model Lab for robot foundation-model development and evaluation. Forcesteed Robotics is one of the companies participating in the Model Lab side of the program.

ugo is positioning Nova as part of a loop from human demonstration through data collection and model training to deployment back onto physical robots. The company says the platform is intended for both R&D and eventual production use, with the same system supporting data collection, model evaluation and task execution.

Nova is also being proposed for the Domestic General-Purpose Robot Development Competition run by AIRoA under a NEDO-backed program. ugo was selected for the competition earlier this year, and the platform was first revealed at the Physical AI Summit in Tokyo. AIRoA describes the competition as a program to develop domestic dual-arm mobile manipulators and prepare successful systems for later mass-production and data-collection phases.

ugo handled Nova’s development, mechanical design and manufacturing, while GK Kyoto led the industrial design and Asratec developed the bilateral teleoperation controller. The company describes Nova as domestically designed and manufactured, although the platform still uses internationally sourced technology including NVIDIA compute.

Founded in 2018, ugo already operates robots across security, inspection and facility-management applications rather than entering the market as a new humanoid startup. In April, it completed a Series B3 led by NTT West, taking cumulative funding to about ¥4 billion (approximately $27 million), according to ugo’s funding announcement.

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