Asimo has retired. The very popular humanoid robot imagined and designed in 2000 by Honda ended, Thursday, March 31, twenty years of public interventions at the Miraikan. The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, in Tokyo, offered him a final lap, after a moving ceremony. “I have many good memories with many people”said Asimo, after receiving a letter of thanks and flowers from the director of the museum, Chieko Asakawa. “He demonstrated the possibility for robots and humans to live together”explains Rikuko Nagashima, a researcher specializing in communication theories.
A project launched in 1986, Asimo, a contraction of Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, has established itself, along with Sony’s Aibo dog, as a symbol of Japan’s progress in robotics. Honda has continued to improve its capabilities, including movement. He could run or hop.
The automaker ended the adventure, after presenting its new project, an avatar robot, at IREX 2022, the major robotics fair, held from March 9 to 12 in Tokyo. This real « second soi » must allow to “to live remote experiences. Avatar robots represent true “4D mobility”,” because they can “playing with time and space”, details Takahide Yoshiike, engineer at Honda. The group aims to market these robots in the 2030s for use in remote work, emergency medical intervention or space exploration. In this area, it will compete with Toyota, designer, in 2017, of the T-HR3. This robot must eventually work on assembly lines.
Health, reception, transport
These advances confirm Japan’s preponderance in robotics – a market expected to reach 339 billion yen (2.5 billion euros) in 2027, against 139 billion yen in 2021. And this, despite growing competition from southern industrialists. Korean or Chinese and the shock caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which had forced Japan to call on foreign manufacturers to obtain robots capable of intervening in the damaged plant in 2011.
In terms of robotics, the Archipelago began in the 1970s with the industrial sector. “The Japanese market for industrial robots is now the second largest in the world, after China”, recalls Milton Guerry, president of the International Federation of Robotics. The Japanese giants in the sector, such as Fanuc and Yaskawa, provide 45% of global demand. And 78% of their production was exported, in 2020, mainly to the United States and China.
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