Medicaroid Brand Guidelines: Kawasaki, Sysmex & the hinotori Surgical Robot From Kobe

A robot maker and a diagnostics maker in Kobe.

Medicaroid is a Kobe maker of surgical robots, set up in 2013 as a joint venture of Kawasaki Heavy Industries, the engineering group that also builds industrial robots, and Sysmex, the Kobe maker of laboratory testing and diagnostic equipment. Japanese Wikipedia’s article on Kawasaki Heavy Industries records that Kawasaki founded Medicaroid with Sysmex in 2013, and its article on Sysmex describes Medicaroid as a joint venture with Kawasaki that belongs to the Kawasaki group. The company gives its date of establishment as 29 August 2013.

Its own history traces it to 2012, when a “Medical Robot Research Group” was formed by Yasuhiko Hashimoto of Kawasaki Heavy Industries, later that company’s president, and Kaoru Asano, a former president of Sysmex. Hashimoto became Medicaroid’s first president. The company says it began with marketing research into how robots might be used in medical settings, started developing a robotic-assisted surgery system in 2015, the year it also set up a subsidiary in the United States, and in 2016 moved its head office to the International Medical Device Alliance building in the Kobe Biomedical Innovation Cluster.

The name is explained on its website: Medicaroid is a fusion of the words “medical” and “android,” chosen to stand for its medical robots. Its first product was not a surgical robot but an operating table. The SOT-100 Vercia, released in Japan in 2017, is described by the company as a robotic operating table built with industrial robot technology, and as its first step into the medical industry.

The hinotori Surgical Robot System.

The company’s main product is the hinotori Surgical Robot System, a name it always writes in lower case. Medicaroid says it obtained manufacturing and marketing approval from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in August 2020, that the system was first used in clinical practice that year, and that it was launched in December 2020 through Sysmex as general sales agent. The company describes an operation unit with eight-axis arms intended to move smoothly like human arms, a “docking-free” design in which the pivot point of each instrument is set by software rather than by docking the arms to the ports, a full high-definition 3D vision system, and an ergonomically designed Surgeon Cockpit where the surgeon works. It credits the result to two inheritances: Kawasaki’s robot technology, which it says has been developed over more than 50 years, and Sysmex’s network and knowledge in healthcare.

Its approvals have widened step by step, according to the company: gastrointestinal surgery and gynecology in Japan in 2022, and thoracic surgery in 2024. Abroad, it filed its first overseas application with Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority in April 2023, received approval there in 2023 and in Malaysia in 2024, and announced approval in Vietnam in June 2026. In July 2026 it said it had obtained CE marking under the EU Medical Device Regulation, which it said allows it to market the system in EU member states; its European subsidiary, Medicaroid Europe GmbH, was set up in Düsseldorf in 2020.

Training is part of the offer. Medicaroid has opened training centres it calls MIL in Kobe in 2020, Nagoya in 2021 and Tokyo in 2022, followed by centres in Belgium in 2023 and France in 2025. In December 2020 it exhibited hi-Sim, a training simulator developed with Mimic Technologies of Seattle, at the Japanese Urological Association’s annual meeting in Kobe. A year earlier it had signed a memorandum of understanding with OPTiM, a Tokyo software company, on applying artificial intelligence to a next-generation medical robot; the companies said they had already been working with Sysmex on service and support systems for robotic surgery using AI and connected-device technology. In December 2022 it set up a subsidiary in Singapore, Medicaroid Asia Pacific, which it said would serve Southeast Asia, Oceania and South Asia.

Design and documentation.

Surgical robotics companies sell machines that most people will never see in use, so their public image is built from a small set of scenes. The commonest is the operating theatre itself: robot arms draped and angled over a table, a console set a few steps away, and a surgical team in scrubs around them. When the BBC reported a new British surgical robot in 2018, one of its pictures showed a surgeon steering a robot from a console.

The second scene is the surgeon’s own view. Many systems give the surgeon a 3D screen or viewer and hand controls, and company photographs often show a surgeon leaning into that viewer or working the controls, sometimes beside a screen showing the magnified view inside the body. Close-ups of instruments follow: slim shafts, small jaws and wristed tips that bend and turn, shown at a scale no visitor to a hospital would normally see.

Clean product renders do much of the remaining work. Arms, carts and consoles are shown against plain white or soft grey grounds, with a restrained palette of whites, greys and a single brand colour, so that the machine reads as precise and calm. Museums have started to collect the results; in 2023 the Science Museum in London put a surgical robot arm on show in its Engineers gallery.

The industry meets at its own congresses. In North America, the annual meeting of SAGES, the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, is a regular venue for new systems; in Europe there is the annual congress of the EAES, the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery; and in London the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics brings engineers and surgeons together. The companies in this guide range from established makers to closed ventures, and each guide sets out what can be checked about them.

An orange sphere held by two hands.

Medicaroid explains its own mark on its website. The logo, it says, shows an orange sphere that stands for the patient’s “life,” supported by two hands: a human hand and a robot hand holding that life together. It names orange as its corporate colour. The same idea runs through the way it describes its robots, which it says are meant to serve and support people rather than replace them, and through its stated mission of developing medical robotic solutions that help everyone live healthier, more peaceful lives.

The company’s leadership has changed several times. Kaoru Asano became president in 2020 and Koji Muneto in 2023, the company says. It describes an “open platform” approach to development, working with Kawasaki’s robot technology, Sysmex’s experience in healthcare, and partners in government, academia, medicine and industry. The robotics side of the partnership has a long history: Medicaroid says Kawasaki made Japan’s first industrial robot in 1969, and Japanese Wikipedia says Kawasaki began making robots in Japan in 1969 in cooperation with Joseph Engelberger, whom it describes as the founder of the world’s first industrial-robot company.

For a design guide, Medicaroid shows a company that has written down what its mark means and tied it to the way it talks about its product. Compare Intuitive and CMR Surgical, two other makers of surgical robots. For this guide we use a warm orange, charcoal, steel grey and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Medicaroid’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.