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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Over a decade old, Honda’s little humanoid robot astonishingly doesn’t seem obsolete [ieee.org]

Honda’s ASIMO humanoid robot is retiring [honda.com]. For the last 20 years, ASIMO had been performing at the Honda showroom in Tokyo, Japan, but these regular demonstrations are now at an end. We’ve known for a while that this was coming [ieee.org]—Honda announced back in 2018 that it was halting ASIMO development in favor of working on robots with more practical applications, like robots for elder care and disaster relief [ieee.org]. But what blows me away about ASIMO, even now, is just how impressive it still is.

[...] This little robot really did set a (still somewhat aspirational) standard, especially relative to other humanoid robots, which have only within the last few years been able to match and then significantly surpass ASIMO’s performance, if not its looks.

[...] But Honda has more recently seemed to realize that they could take the ASIMO platform and the philosophy of humanoid robotics that it represents only so far, and as of 2018 the company shifted development to a clearly ASIMO-inspired but much more robust robot called E2-DR [ieee.org].

The short article has some nice videos of ASIMO:
Performance video from 2010 [youtu.be]
History of Honda robotics [youtu.be]
2017 demo [youtu.be]
E2-DR demo [youtu.be]

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