Ecomott Inc. announced that its research and development project involving multiple quadruped walking robots for autonomous patrols to address brown bear threats has been selected under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Go-Tech Program. The project will run from August 2026 to March 2029 and will use a combination of physical AI and robotics to support local zoning management.
Ecomott Inc. announced that its research and development project to establish orchestration technology for multiple quadruped walking robots to address urban bears has been selected under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s FY2026 Go-Tech Program. The project will run from August 2026 to March 2029 and will begin the development of a robot system supporting brown bear zoning management.
The project aims to create a system in which multiple robots autonomously patrol buffer zones and control areas by combining IoT sensing, the cloud, edge AI and physical AI. The work will focus on three areas: converting outdoor environments into 3D data and establishing autonomous walking AI using digital twins; developing cooperative control, or orchestration, technology; and building a management system that uses edge AI to detect objects and is accessed through a web application. Video and location data will be integrated and analyzed in the cloud.
The project aims to help resolve the urban bear problem resulting from the increasing appearance of brown bears and Asiatic black bears in Hokkaido and the Tohoku region, and to advance zoning management. Municipalities are promoting the classification of areas into core habitats, buffer zones, control areas and exclusion areas, but shortages of personnel and an aging workforce are current challenges. The project seeks to strengthen monitoring and management systems through autonomous patrol technology.
Based on the results of this program, the technology is expected to be commercialized as autonomous patrol robots for wildlife damage control in municipal, agricultural and livestock operations, and applied across a broad range of fields, including smart agriculture, infrastructure inspections and disaster monitoring, such as electric-fence inspections and crop monitoring. Ecomott Inc. has grown around its IoT and sensor technologies.