ASIMO walks
Honda unveils a 1.2-metre humanoid that walks, climbs stairs and shakes hands; the public image of the robot updates, and the intelligence inside stays scripted.
what had to happen · 1 events back to 1943
Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. Direct influences are marked.
I · Foundations · 1
- 1961Unimate, the first industrial robotdirect
Honda had been working on walking machines since 1986 in secret, and on 31 October 2000 it showed the result. ASIMO, the Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, was 120 centimetres tall, weighed 52 kilograms, and walked with a bent-kneed gait that looked, for the first time in a robot, unremarkable. Later versions ran, climbed stairs, carried trays and recognised faces. It toured the world for eighteen years, opened the New York Stock Exchange, and was retired in 2018.
There was no learning in ASIMO's walking. Its balance came from control theory, its behaviours from scripts, its speech from a menu. It is on this timeline because it defined, for a generation, what the public expected a robot to look like, and because its retirement coincided with the arrival of the thing it lacked.
The humanoids of the 2020s, from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure and a dozen Chinese companies, walk less elegantly than ASIMO did and are far more capable, because they learn their movements in simulation and take instructions from language models. The body Honda perfected and the mind it could not build met about twenty-five years apart.
what it led to · 0 events downstream
A leaf, for now. Nothing in the archive has built on it yet.