Walden

Walden Robotics in Cambridge, Massachusetts has not yet given its robot a public name, even though the machine has been working on a production line at a Toyota plant in North America since February 2026.

The company was spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026 under chief executive Russ Tedrake and emerged from stealth on 15 July 2026 with a 300 million USD seed round led by Toyota and Deviation Capital at a valuation of 1.1 billion USD; NVIDIA, Boeing and Samsung are among the investors, and a partnership with Samsung SDS has been signed.

From an interview with Tedrake it is known that the robot is a legless humanoid upper body on a large wheeled base that houses the batteries, equipped with simple, rugged two-finger grippers, and deliberately built heavy to handle high loads, though no figure is quoted. Height, weight, degrees of freedom and runtime are not disclosed.

The core of the project is software: Large Behavior Models drawn from TRI's physical-AI research allow the robot to learn tasks rather than be programmed. At the Toyota plant it loads and unloads parts, cleans machines and assembles kits; the maker also lists machine tending, tool setting, picking and assembly. The status is a pilot deployment and the price is on request.

A commercially available wheeled counterpart is H2-D.