Honda Robotics — ASIMO, E2-DR, and the return of the humanoid

• 1986
  Robotics program founded
• Wako, Japan
  R&D center
• ASIMO
  Flagship (2000–2018)
• NYSE: HMC
  Parent listing
• Japan
  Country
• Public
  Status

About Honda Robotics

Honda Robotics is not a standalone company — it is the humanoid and mobility robotics research program of Honda Motor Co., Ltd., the Japanese automotive and motorcycle giant founded in 1948 by Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa. The robotics program began in 1986 as a highly secret in-house effort at Honda's Wako Fundamental Technical Research Center in Saitama, Japan, driven by a simple but audacious thesis: that a car company with world-class powertrain, mechanical, and control expertise could build a machine that walked like a human. For more than a decade the work was essentially invisible outside Honda, producing the E-series experimental bipeds (E0 through E6, 1986–1993) that solved the raw problem of stable dynamic walking.

The world first saw the fruits of that work with the P-series humanoids (1993–1997): P1, P2, and P3 were the first full-size, self-contained humanoid robots ever publicly demonstrated. P2, unveiled in 1996, could walk untethered on two legs and climb stairs — a capability no previous humanoid had achieved outside a laboratory tether. Those prototypes led directly to ASIMO — Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility — which was unveiled in October 2000 and became one of the most recognizable robots in the world. Over its 18-year active life, ASIMO iterated through four major versions (2000, 2004, 2005, and 2011), progressively adding running, faster walking, hand dexterity, and enough degrees of freedom to serve drinks, climb stairs, and interact with people in unstructured environments.

In July 2018 Honda announced it would cease ASIMO robot development and production in its original form, redirecting the underlying technology toward more practical applications such as remote-controlled avatar robots, personal mobility devices, and disaster response. ASIMO made its final public active appearance in March 2022. Between the announcement of its retirement and the current AI boom, Honda continued to publish research on the E2-DR disaster-response humanoid (presented at IROS 2015 and IROS 2017) and launched the UNI-CUB and later UNI-ONE personal mobility devices that leveraged ASIMO's balance-control technology. Honda also introduced its broader Honda 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) robotics concept at CES 2018.

In 2024 Honda began publicly signaling a return to humanoid robotics, and in April 2026 Honda Motor Co. formally announced a dedicated robotics division, separate from its core automotive business, tasked with turning four decades of bipedal research into deployable industrial machines. The roadmap — overseen by Dr. Kenji Matsumoto, previously head of Honda's advanced mobility research laboratory in Wako — targets a logistics-oriented first model in late 2026, a manufacturing-grade humanoid in 2027, and a general-purpose platform in 2028. That places Honda directly in the current humanoid-robotics AI boom alongside Tesla Optimus, Figure 03, Boston Dynamics Atlas, Agility Digit, Apptronik Apollo, 1X NEO, and Toyota Research Institute's humanoid work — but with the deepest bipedal-locomotion research legacy of any company in the field.

Technology stack

Honda's robotics stack is the deepest and longest-running body of bipedal-locomotion research of any company in the humanoid field. Where newer entrants have had to build their control stack, actuator design, and safety envelope essentially from scratch, Honda has been iterating on the same core mathematical, mechanical, and electrical problem set since 1986. The result is a set of internally proven subsystems — balance control, whole-body coordination, harmonic-drive electric actuators, thin-profile packaging, and onboard perception — that the new 2026 industrial humanoid program inherits directly.

Perception

ASIMO used stereo vision, laser range finders, and ultrasonic sensors to recognize faces, map the environment, and track people. It could distinguish voices in noisy environments and follow multiple concurrent conversations. E2-DR extended that stack with a broader multi-camera and time-of-flight arrangement suited to smoke, dust, and low-light infrastructure-inspection environments, and it operated in a certified temperature range of −10 °C to 40 °C — a real-world envelope well beyond what most humanoid demos have publicly documented.

Balance control and whole-body coordination

Honda's contribution to bipedal robotics is, above all else, dynamic balance. The company's ASIMO-derived Zero-Moment-Point (ZMP) balance control has been continuously refined for nearly four decades and now underpins Honda's personal-mobility products (UNI-CUB, UNI-ONE) as well as its humanoid platforms. The 2011 ASIMO could hop, run, walk backwards, change direction mid-stride, and recover from unexpected pushes — a demonstration envelope that remained the industry reference for years.

Actuators, power, and compute

Honda humanoids use electric brushless DC (BLDC) actuators paired with harmonic-drive reducers throughout — no hydraulics. Batteries evolved from nickel–metal hydride in the 2000 ASIMO (38.4 V, 10 Ah, 7.7 kg) to lithium-ion (51.8 V, 6 kg) from 2004 onward, and to a 1000 Wh lithium-ion pack in E2-DR. Onboard compute in E2-DR uses an Intel Core-i7 CPU with a discrete GPU, cooled by a segregated air-duct structure through the torso, and the DC-DC converters alone consume 226 W — a useful benchmark for the thermal design of a comparable modern humanoid.

Power management is a particularly demanding subsystem for a humanoid of this class. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver stages and requires tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. The onboard battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — subsystems whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long a humanoid platform can run between charges. Precision MLCC capacitors, low-inductance shunt resistors, and high-speed board-to-board connectors distributed across every power and signal rail are just as critical to the final robot as the headline actuators and compute modules.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Honda-class humanoid platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, harmonic-drive servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail. A single E2-DR-class robot documents 33 degrees of freedom, an Intel Core-i7 with discrete GPU, and a 1000 Wh battery pack — every one of those subsystems is its own dense sub-BOM.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution — a real risk for any team still maintaining ASIMO-era demonstration hardware, E2-DR prototypes, or first-generation UNI-CUB units. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. Honda®, ASIMO®, E2-DR, UNI-CUB®, UNI-ONE, Honda Robotics, and Honda 3E are trademarks of Honda Motor Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Honda Motor Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.