Honda revives its humanoid programme with a quiet announcement and a long memory

Honda retired Asimo in 2018 to a wave of public nostalgia. The robot that walked on stage, climbed stairs, and hosted school children in Tokyo for two decades was, the company explained at the time, no longer the right shape for the work ahead.

This week, Honda announced a new humanoid programme. Nikkei Asia has the basics. Reuters has the more important context: Honda never stopped robotics research.

We never stopped working. — Honda engineering manager (via Reuters)

What the new programme is

The announcement explicitly references the Asimo lineage and emphasises industrial deployment as the new commercial target. The new platform is electric (Asimo was already electric, decades before the rest of the industry caught up), built around a smaller and lighter form factor, and aimed at automotive assembly, where Honda's own factories provide the obvious first deployment environment.

The programme is positioned as a return to commercial seriousness rather than a continuation of the showroom-friendly Asimo era. The company is signalling that it intends to compete with Tesla, Toyota-FANUC, and the US humanoid programmes in the industrial market.

Why this is credible

Two reasons.

The first is institutional memory. Honda's robotics research never paused after Asimo's retirement. The team that built Asimo, broadly speaking, has continued working on related problems with less public visibility. The new programme inherits that body of work directly.