Honda retired ASIMO in 2022. The humanoid’s last regular demonstrations ended at Tokyo’s Miraikan science museum on March 31, 2022, after 20 years of daily shows, and Honda had already stopped developing ASIMO itself before then. Honda never sold ASIMO to the public. The company’s own explanation is that a fully autonomous two-legged robot that can work safely around people still needs long-term research and new laws, so it moved its robotics work to remotely operated avatar robots and simpler machines built for one job each. The name lives on in another form: Honda’s in-house vehicle software, announced in January 2025, is called ASIMO OS.
When and how ASIMO stopped appearing
ASIMO debuted in 2000 and started working at Miraikan in January 2002 as an exhibition guide. By the time demonstrations ended on March 31, 2022, it had performed 15,466 shows there and met an estimated 2 million visitors, according to Miraikan’s announcement.
Honda had also run daily shows at its Tokyo head office. Japanese newspaper Yomiuri reported in February 2022 that Honda had halted ASIMO’s development several years earlier and planned to stop regular appearances at the head office around the same time as Miraikan, while keeping the robot for exhibits and research. The report was republished by Asia News Network.
Why Honda stopped
Honda explains its decision on its What We Learned From ASIMO page, and the reasoning is about safety and autonomy, not about walking.
- Falls around people. All ASIMO units together took more than 33.26 million steps and walked 7,907 km (4,913 miles). Honda built technology to soften collisions, but its engineers kept asking what would happen if a robot fell where a child was standing. Honda concluded that robots living with people must be designed for many more of those scenarios.
- Real autonomy is hard. Understanding a messy home or public space and deciding what to do without a human operator remained, in Honda’s words, a major challenge after more than 25 years of bipedal research.
- Rules don’t exist yet. Honda says a fully autonomous walking robot will need long-term R&D plus social consensus and laws that allow people and robots to live together.
ASIMO did prove three things Honda wanted: moving through a space shared with people without falling when bumped, doing tasks with its hands, and interacting by understanding speech and guessing what nearby people intended.
What Honda builds instead
Rather than one humanoid that does everything, Honda now aims to build several robots, each made for a narrower job, according to its Honda Robotics page. The two directions it names are saving people time (by letting them work remotely or automating tasks) and extending what their bodies can do.
- Honda Avatar Robot: a robot a person controls from somewhere else. Honda’s example is a doctor at home logging into the nearest avatar robot to start emergency treatment without traveling.
- UNI-ONE: a hands-free, seated personal mobility device.
- Non-walking robots: Honda tested a guide robot at Narita International Airport that moves on balls and wheels instead of legs, including tests that assumed a collision with a small child.
ASIMO OS is a car operating system, not a robot
At CES 2025, Honda announced ASIMO OS, its own vehicle operating system planned for the Honda 0 Series electric cars. Honda describes it as the core software for the 0 Series’ intelligent features. Honda said it chose the name because it wants the 0 Series to surprise and inspire people the way ASIMO did. There is no new ASIMO robot.
Why ASIMO still matters for today’s humanoids
The problems Honda named are the same ones today’s humanoid companies face: what happens when a walking robot falls near a person, how much it can decide without a remote operator, and which safety rules apply in homes and public spaces. Most humanoids in use in 2026 work in factories, warehouses or supervised pilots rather than freely among the public.
For where that work stands now, see our list of humanoid robot companies in 2026, and our tracking of Figure 03 and Tesla Optimus.