Denso Lets a Driverless Forklift Load Its Own Trucks

Denso and Toyota Industries said on October 26, 2026 that they have begun automating truck loading and unloading at Denso’s Anjo Plant 204 in Japan, starting with one driverless forklift and one truck run a day.

The plant builds inverters, the units that turn direct current from a battery into the alternating current that drives an electrified vehicle’s motor. Loading those parts onto trucks has depended heavily on manual labor, and both companies point to worker shortages in Japanese manufacturing as the reason for the change.

The joint release from Denso and Toyota Industries pairs the Rinova Autonomous forklift from Toyota Industries with Denso’s LiDsEYE lidar sensor. The forklift finds where a truck has stopped, reads the position and angle of each pallet, plans its own route and then loads or unloads the truck. It carries its own obstacle detection, while the lidar watches the whole truck yard for people and obstacles and can stop the forklift when someone walks in.

Newswitch reported that the setup uses four lidar units and that this is the first time Denso has automated truck loading at a factory. It is also the first time Toyota Industries has placed this forklift within the Toyota Group, and the companies aim to widen its use and take it to other plants.

The next step is to have the lidar measure the position and size of the cargo and pass that to the forklift, which currently plans its loading route from its own cameras. Toyota Industries also wants steadier handling where pallets of different sizes are mixed, and Denso wants better detection accuracy.

The project has no direct effect on US buyers or Toyota’s US plants for now. Neither company’s release mentions a site outside Japan, and neither gives a cost or a schedule for expanding the system.

The Toyota Report Take

One forklift and one truck a day is a small start, but the choice of plant is the interesting part. Inverters are central to the hybrids Toyota is building more of, and this is real production freight, not a demonstration. If the system holds up on mixed pallets, it is easy to imagine the same setup at other group plants, and the labor pressures that drove it are hardly unique to Japan.