Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

The Japanese automaker behind ASIMO, a pioneer of bipedal humanoid robot research.

Honda Motor was founded by Soichiro Honda in 1948, is headquartered in Tokyo, and is best known for motorcycles and cars. It began researching bipedal robots in 1986; its 1996 prototype, P2, carried its own power source and could walk stably on slopes and stairs, earning an IEEE Milestone designation in April 2026. Its year-2000 robot, ASIMO, walked and ran using model-based balance control such as the zero moment point, and became the benchmark humanoid robot of the era before deep learning took off. In 2003, Honda set up Honda Research Institutes (HRI) in Japan, the US, and Germany for frontier AI and robotics research. Around ASIMO's retirement in March 2022, Honda shifted toward more practical directions: it unveiled a teleoperated “avatar robot” in 2021, and in May 2026 showed a 16-degree-of-freedom multi-fingered dexterous hand in Tokyo, reportedly planned for factory assembly use in the early 2030s.

ExampleHonda's avatar robot is remotely controlled by a person, while its AI infers what the operator is trying to grasp and automatically fine-tunes the hand's posture and grip force — aimed at work like disaster response or equipment repair where sending a person is impractical.

Also called

Honda

Related

Honda ASIMO · Zero Moment Point · Bipedal Locomotion · HRP Humanoid Robot Series · Dexterous Hand · Teleoperation

Sources

Honda P2 Humanoid Bipedal Robot Recognized as IEEE Milestone (Honda, 2026-04)
Honda Avatar Robot | Honda Technology
Honda Robotics Returns: The Dexterous Hand After ASIMO (Intelligent Living, 2026-08)

As of

2026-08