Company Profile

Coarobo GK's founders first met at the Robotics Laboratory of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Nara, Japan, where they competed together on the international stage as Team NAIST. Their joint engineering work culminated in 1st Place at the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge during ICRA 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden, an experience that exposed the immense and largely invisible cost of system integration in modern robotics and set the technical agenda Coarobo GK pursues to this day.

Building on that result, the founders partnered with Panasonic Corporation as Team NAIST-Panasonic to compete at the Amazon Robotics Challenge in Nagoya, Japan in 2017, where they earned a Finalist Prize while carrying the integration lessons from Airbus into the high-throughput logistics domain. This collaboration cemented a long-term industrial partnership with Panasonic and established the multi-institutional engineering model, with academia and industry working side by side on shared deployment infrastructure, that has defined Coarobo GK's work ever since.

Those shared foundations carried directly into the World Robot Summit (WRS) Future Convenience Store Challenge (FCSC), where the founders competed from 2018 through 2025 as Team NAIST-RITS-Panasonic (NaRiPa) alongside Panasonic Corporation and Ritsumeikan University . The team's top honors across successive editions include the NEDO Chairman's Award (2018), the SICE Award (2018), the METI Minister's Award (2020), and both the SICE Award and the WRS Executive Committee Chairperson's Award (2025) at the Osaka-Kansai Expo in Osaka, Japan. Coarobo GK was formally incorporated in Kyoto, Japan on December 9, 2019 to consolidate these efforts into a sustainable, mission-driven entity.

Drawing on the deployment expertise accumulated across these competitions, founder Lotfi El Hafi served as a Specially Appointed Researcher of the HSR Community at Toyota Motor Corporation from 2020 to 2022, where he architected a containerized Software Development Environment (SDE) leveraging cloud-first, open-source technologies to accelerate cross-institutional collaborative R&D in service robotics. More than twenty institutions across Japan and the European Union have since evaluated the SDE, with roughly half adopting it for active research. This work earned Coarobo GK's founders the inaugural HSR Community Research Encouragement Award from the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) in 2022 and was subsequently published in Advanced Robotics , the international peer-reviewed journal of the RSJ.

With the SDE in place as a stable platform for experimentation, the founders pursued state-of-the-art research on probabilistic inference, contrastive learning, and concept formation for service robots, earning successive international Best Paper Awards at IEEE/SICE SII 2023 in Atlanta, United States, at IEEE IRC 2024 in Tokyo, Japan, and from the Advanced Robotics journal of the Robotics Society of Japan in 2025.

On the strength of this combined record across competition, deployment, and peer-reviewed research, Coarobo GK now contributes to the JST Moonshot R&D Program on the Avatar-Symbiotic Society project, and continues to release and maintain its containerized Software Development Environment (SDE) as an open-source reference implementation at gitlab.com/coarobo/SDE for the global research community.