Cartken is building Hauler robots into Japanese industrial logistics

Cartken announced on June 25, 2025 that Melco Mobility Solutions ordered nearly 100 Cartken Hauler robots for industrial facilities in Japan. Melco is a Mitsubishi Electric Group company and has distributed Cartken robots in Japan since 2022.

The order targets factories, warehouses, logistics, medical, and life-sciences facilities. That moves Cartken beyond the food-delivery category into heavier internal transport, where payload, route reliability, elevator integration, and local service matter more than consumer ordering volume.

Cartken Hauler is designed for interbuilding transport with payload capacity up to 660 pounds. The robot can navigate ramps, uneven ground, all-weather routes, and elevator-integrated multi-floor delivery work in Japan.

Cartken was founded by former Google engineers, including Christian Bersch, Anjali Jindal Naik, and Jonas Witt. The company?s earlier delivery-robot work gave it a compact outdoor autonomy base; the Melco order asks whether that base can stretch into industrial material movement with larger payloads and more facility-specific operations.

The competitive field includes Starship, Kiwibot, Coco Robotics, Relay Robotics, Neubility, OTTO Motors, MiR, and indoor AMR vendors moving into facility logistics. Cartken?s distinction in this event is the Japanese channel: Mitsubishi Electric distribution and Melco?s local customer access give Hauler a route into industrial facilities that a standalone delivery startup would struggle to reach.

Public material does not show deployed unit count after the order, route productivity by facility, fleet uptime, service response time, intervention frequency, unit pricing, renewal terms, or customer-level payload utilization. The order is a strong commercial signal, but it still needs operating metrics after rollout.

Cartken?s Hauler program tests whether sidewalk-delivery autonomy can become industrial logistics capacity. If Melco turns the nearly 100-unit order into reliable material moves across Japanese facilities, Cartken can position Hauler as a channel-led transport layer for sites that need autonomy between buildings, floors, and work zones.

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