Toyota Material Handling Europe today announced the results of a physical AI collaboration with NVIDIA and SoftServe, demonstrating how AI-powered simulation and digital twin technologies can significantly accelerate autonomous solution commissioning by up to 50%.
Building a simulation-first foundation for autonomous material handling
Together, the companies enable a simulation-first digital twin foundation for autonomous forklift development and validation powered by the NVIDIA open physical AI stack, connecting engineering, simulation, digital twins and material handling operations. The collaboration combines Toyota Material Handling’s legacy of quality and lean thinking with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, the NVIDIA Isaac Sim open robotics simulation framework, and SoftServe’s digital engineering capabilities to validate autonomous vehicle behaviour in real-time physics-based simulation before customer deployment.
“Through virtual commissioning and digital twin technology, we can secure quality while eliminating muda, or waste, before deployment begins,” said Johan Rosén, Senior Vice President Research & Development at Toyota Material Handling Europe. “By identifying and resolving issues earlier in the process, we can reduce implementation effort, accelerate customer value, and deliver automation solutions with greater confidence.”
Toyota Material Handling Europe integrated NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and NVIDIA Isaac Sim into their custom pipelines to develop new autonomous solutions tailored to the unique environments of each customer. Through a simulation-first approach, Toyota can optimise and validate solutions before deployment at a customer site. SoftServe, an NVIDIA Elite Partner since 2022 and NVIDIA Advanced Technology Partner since 2026, engineered the digital twin environment behind this work, translating NVIDIA’s technology stack for physical AI into a simulation environment Toyota Material Handling could run in production to ensure zero muda; no waste in terms of time or resource at customer site.
“Zero Muda sets a clear bar: eliminate waste before it happens, not after,” said Olha Moroz, EVP and Head of EMEA, SoftServe. “SoftServe is proud to support this by using NVIDIA Omniverse and simulation engineering built for Toyota Material Handling Europe’s customers — catching issues by using simulations in the digital twin world long before they could ever reach the forklift on the customer’s floor.”
Using NVIDIA technologies for Physical AI to improve safety and operational performance
By integrating Omniverse libraries, Toyota Material Handling will create digital twins to simulate factory layouts, validate autonomous forklift navigation, safety logic, vehicle behaviour and customer-specific edge cases. The integration enables autonomous vehicles to safely operate alongside people, manual forklifts and mixed shopfloor traffic in the warehouse.
The collaboration further extends AI into production through NVIDIA-powered vision AI and intelligent agents for quality inspection, predictive maintenance, process optimisation, and energy management. Within this scope, to train the camera-based pallet detection module, synthetic data was generated with Omniverse libraries and augmented with NVIDIA Cosmos open world foundation models. This led to a more than 70% improvement in object-detection recall on evaluated real-world warehouse datasets.
The initiative targets up to a 40% reduction in time-to-market and up to 50% commissioning effort reduction, helping customers realize value from autonomous material handling faster by reducing on-site commissioning disruption, improving solution quality before go-live, and shortening the path from design to validated deployment, improve engineering productivity, production flexibility, and product quality, while lowering operational costs through AI-powered material handling at scale.
“Our ambition is to achieve zero muda: removing waste that hinders productivity in material handling operations,” said Ernesto Dominguez, President and CEO of Toyota Material Handling Europe. “By combining our lean thinking and automation expertise with NVIDIA’s platform for Physical AI and SoftServe’s engineering capabilities, we can accelerate innovation, improve solution quality and help customers achieve zero muda in their automated and autonomous operations.”
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