ASIMO is the humanoid that defined what the word meant for a generation. Honda unveiled it on 20 November 2000 as the public face of research that had been running quietly since 1986, when the engineers behind the E0 walking rig started taking human gait apart joint by joint. Before ASIMO there were the E-series legs and the P-series prototypes — P2 in 1996 was the first self-contained bipedal humanoid ever shown publicly, 1.82 m tall and 210 kg, tethered to nothing.
What made ASIMO different was that it was built to be seen. At 130 cm it was sized to look a seated adult in the eye and to operate light switches and door handles, and Honda sent it out to do daily demonstrations rather than laboratory videos. Across all units it walked 7,907 km and took more than 33.26 million steps in front of live audiences over more than twenty years — a figure no other humanoid comes close to, and the reason that a whole generation's mental image of a robot is a small white astronaut waving on a stage.
The last version, shown in November 2011, was the technical peak: 48 kg (six lighter than its predecessor), 57 degrees of freedom against the previous 34, a top walking speed of 9 km/h, and the ability to run, run backwards, hop on one leg and jump on two. Its 13-joint hands carried tactile and force sensors precise enough to pick up a glass bottle and twist off the cap, or to shape sign-language expressions. It recharged itself and ran about 40 minutes on a charge.
Honda has since redirected its robotics work away from legs, testing wheeled and ball-balancing platforms in public spaces such as Narita Airport, and ASIMO's daily demonstrations have ended; the company has not published a formal closing date for the programme. Its legacy is more visible in its competitors than in any Honda product: nearly every humanoid in this catalogue stands on control theory that ASIMO proved could survive contact with a crowded room.