Seven-Eleven Japan and Telexistence have partnered to develop a humanoid robot called “Astra,” powered by generative AI and a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. The goal is to deploy Astra in store environments by 2029 to automate routine in-store tasks while letting staff focus on higher-value, human work. They’ll combine hardware design, dataset collection, and model training across more than 20,000 convenience stores to accelerate real-world robot deployment.
