Before a Chinese humanoid can take on ground-handling work at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, JAL Ground Service has to decide which jobs are suitable and what safety conditions the machine must meet. GMO AI & Robotics then adjusts its movements for an airport where people, vehicles and equipment share limited space.
Ground handling is a revealing robotic test. Baggage and cargo are moved around aircraft in an environment built for human reach and movement, not for fixed automation. A humanoid may be able to use that environment without expensive alterations, but it still has to learn a series of tightly controlled tasks without creating new risks.
The trial began in May and is scheduled to run through 2028. JAL is mapping airport tasks and checking safety; GMO is supplying the robots and developing the motion programs. The machines arrive able to walk, carry and balance. Their airport jobs still have to be written into software.
In June, GMO became Unitree Robotics’ authorized distributor in Japan. The agreement covers implementation support, software development, secure communications, maintenance and operations as well as sales.
GMO also rents humanoids for proof-of-concept trials, allowing a customer to test one without buying it and giving the company experience across different sites.
GMO AIR is drawing on the wider GMO Internet Group’s communications, cloud, security and financial services. Those assets become relevant when a robot must connect to a customer’s network, be monitored over time and be offered through rental or leasing rather than only an outright sale.
Unitree can ship the same platform to several Asian markets. It cannot practically reproduce every customer’s workflow from Hangzhou or maintain every site. Firms such as GMO are placing themselves in that gap.
A fault that is routine for Unitree’s engineers may be unfamiliar to the technician standing beside the machine in Tokyo. JAL will still need to know who restores service and explains what happened. When the workflow changes, the motion program may have to change with it; a second site brings another round of integration.
The three-year Haneda trial can absorb extra supervision and repeated adjustment. Paid daily operations cannot. Baggage does not wait while a movement is rebuilt or a problem is referred across time zones.
GXO made that transition after testing Agility Robotics’ Digit in a US warehouse in late 2023. The logistics company signed a multi-year Robots-as-a-Service agreement the following year. Digit was connected with autonomous mobile robots and conveyors, taking totes from one system and placing them onto another. By November 2025, Agility said the robots had moved more than 100,000 totes at the facility.
Agility supplies Digit, its fleet-management platform and much of the deployment expertise. Its software covers facility mapping, workflow definition, fleet operations and troubleshooting. At Haneda, comparable functions are divided among Unitree, GMO and JAL rather than held by one supplier.
At GXO, commercial use meant a narrow task repeated thousands of times inside an existing workflow, managed through a service agreement rather than a one-off equipment sale. That difference changes where revenue may sit. A reseller earns a margin when a robot changes hands. GMO is positioning itself to earn from rentals, software, maintenance and operations after installation.
The business depends on solving enough ordinary problems locally that every fault does not become a call to engineers in China. Technical control may not follow customer responsibility so neatly.
If Unitree retains tight control over software tools and updates, GMO could be answerable to JAL without being able to resolve a serious fault on its own. A response-time promise is only as good as the access behind it.
Lower-priced hardware does not settle the economics either. Extensive customization can erase the initial saving, while a local service agreement may still leave the customer dependent on the manufacturer’s headquarters. A Japanese partner shortens the distance to the customer; it does not make an unreliable machine reliable.
The practical test is whether GMO’s technicians receive the training, spare parts and software access to handle routine failures without waiting for Unitree. JAL will also need a clear escalation path: what can be fixed in Japan, when engineers in China become involved and who remains responsible while they do.
The second contract will be more revealing than the Haneda demonstration. If GMO can take what it learns there to another airport without rebuilding the project from scratch, it will have created more than a distribution business.
Haneda may then show something larger than whether a humanoid can move baggage. The machines are Chinese. The business that makes them useful may be built in Japan.
Jun Yan is a former DiDi senior executive and venture-backed technology founder. He writes about technology commercialization, capital and cross-border market access. His commentary has appeared in the South China Morning Post and The Business Times.
