Kawasaki is going all-in on robots, as Ai-powered senior citizen companion revealed

Kawasaki has revealed another new robot, and while this one is rather more sensible and a lot more cute than the four-legged Corleo, it gives us another reason to look back at the company’s increasingly serious plans for robotics.

Called Home LEO, the new machine has been developed as a social robot for elderly people living at home. Kawasaki says it can recognise its surroundings, interact with people, monitor what is happening around it and eventually assist with everyday tasks. 

Japan, like numerous East Asian regions, is struggling with falling birthrates and an ageing population. Shortages in the number of healthcare professionals and care workers, and rising social security costs, are only exacerbating the matter. Home LEO is set to ease at least some of that burden. 

The company is planning demonstration trials with healthcare organisations and government bodies, with a potential launch in Japan in fiscal 2028.

On its own, that is interesting enough, particularly given Kawasaki’s long history in industrial robotics. But for motorcyclists, the more interesting bit is what it tells us about the technology sitting behind another Kawasaki project that is considerably harder to explain to your mates down the pub.

Yep, we are talking about Corleo.

Kawasaki first showed the four-legged machine at Expo 2025 in Osaka, looking for all the world like somebody had given a horse to the engineering department and told them to make it a motorcycle. The idea is actually rather more considered than that, with Corleo designed as an off-road personal mobility vehicle that uses four robotic legs instead of wheels – and hydrogen power, just because.

The rider controls it through body movements, much like riding a horse or using your weight to influence a motorcycle. More recently, patents revealed that Kawasaki has been looking at using a special suit fitted with IMUs to monitor the rider’s movements and centre of gravity, turning those inputs into commands for the machine. 

They are also planned riding modes, including Slow, Fast, Automatic and the rather wonderfully named Wasteland mode, which sounds great for legging it from armed raiders and zombies!

And while that all sounds very much like science fiction, Kawasaki is definitely not treating Corleo as such. The company has established a dedicated SAFE ADVENTURE development team and says it is working towards having Corleo operating at Expo 2030 in Riyadh. Commercialisation of the machine is targeted to begin in around 2035. A riding simulator is also being developed, with Kawasaki looking at applications in gaming and esports as well as development work.

There is a common thread running through all of this. Kawasaki is trying to make machines that can understand what a human wants to do, interpret their surroundings and then intervene where necessary. In Corleo’s case, that means reading rider inputs and potentially correcting them when the machine thinks the rider is about to do something particularly unwise. Kawasaki calls this ‘adaptive shared control’.

Home LEO is obviously aimed at a completely different job, but it is another example of Kawasaki putting physical AI and robotics into machines designed to interact directly with people.

And that perhaps makes Corleo a little more interesting than it first appeared. It is still an extremely strange thing to look at, and the idea of swapping your adventure bike for a hydrogen-powered robotic horse remains a considerable leap of faith – I mean, people aren’t really buying electric ADV bikes yet. 

Surely a hydrogen-powered ride-on adventure robot is a jump too far!?

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