Japan airport to test humanoid robots as ground handlers

TOKYO — Japan Airlines (JAL) will start using humanoid robots in ground handling tasks at Tokyo’s Haneda airport beginning May in a two-year trial, with a view to deploying them permanently as a solution to the country’s chronic labor shortage.The Chinese-made humanoids will move travellers’ luggage and cargo on the tarmac at Haneda, which handles more than 60 million passengers a year.JAL and its partner in the initiative, Japan Airlines GMO Internet Group, hope the experiment – which ends in 2028 – will lessen the burden on human employees amid a surge in inbound tourism and forecasts of more severe labour shortages.In a demonstration for the media this week, a 130cm-tall robot manufactured by Hangzhou-based Unitree was seen tentatively “pushing” cargo on to a conveyer belt next to a JAL passenger plane and waving to an unseen colleague.The president of JAL Ground Service, Yoshiteru Suzuki, said using robots to perform physically demanding work would “inevitably reduce the burden on workers and provide significant benefits to employees”, according to the Kyodo news agency.Suzuki added, however, that certain key tasks – such as safety management – would continue to be performed by humans.The carrier hopes that these robots can also be used to clean cabins and operate ground support equipment in future.Robots are already being used in some airports across Japan, including for security patrol and retail.Japan’s aviation industry is wrestling with a labour crunch brought on by the increase in inbound tourism and a declining working-age population, said JAL, which employs some 4,000 ground handling staff.More than 7 million people visited the country in the first two months of 2026, according to the Japan National Tourism Organisation, after a record 42.7 million last year, despite a drop in the number of visitors from China triggered by a diplomatic row between Tokyo and Beijing.According to one estimate, Japan will need more than 6.5 million foreign workers in 2040 to reach its growth targets as the indigenous workforce continues to shrink. The country’s foreign population has risen dramatically in recent years, but the government is now under political pressure to rein in immigration.The president of GMO AI and Robotics, Tomohiro Uchida, said: “While airports appear highly automated and standardised, their back-end operations still rely heavily on human labor and face serious labor shortages.”Robots can operate continuously for two to three hours and the firms are planning to use them to perform other tasks, such as cleaning aircraft cabins.