ABEJA starts autonomous drone work for Mitsubishi Heavy

ABEJA positions itself as a company that turns enterprise AI from proof of concept into actual operations, built around its ABEJA Platform. That platform combines Agentic AI for decision-making with Physical AI for execution, and it is designed around a "Human in the Loop" architecture that ABEJA says enables "zero PoC" — skipping the concept-validation stage and moving straight to real use.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the commissioning party here. The relationship is not new: ABEJA says it was commissioned in February 2026 to begin examining the feasibility of joint research on VLA models, which handle vision, language, and action together. The current work is described as a step beyond that earlier consideration.

The stakes appear to sit with both sides. For Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the question is whether autonomy for unmanned aircraft can be validated in a way that fits real operations; for ABEJA, the test is whether its platform's promise of going straight to practical deployment holds up in a demanding setting. No timeline or contract value is given, so how far this moves beyond verification remains open.