How ASIMO Worked

Superfan Kat asked for an episode all about Honda's robot ASIMO, which was recently retired. Learn all about the bot meant to interact with human beings.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
how stuff Works. My love all things tech and in
late June, Honda announced it would stopped production on its

(00:25):
humanoid robot Awesomo, leveraging the work that went into creating
the bot for other applications. Tech Stuff super fan Cat,
who loves this robot, requested I do a show about Osomo,
and I'm happy to do it. Fun fact before we
get into the Osomo story and what made it special

(00:46):
and how it worked, the very first article I ever
wrote for how stuff works dot Com once I was
hired was how Osomo Works Now. I technically rewrote a
couple of articles before, at where they wanted to test
my abilities by giving me an existing article and saying
could you rewrite this? Could you update it? But the

(01:07):
first full assignment beginning to end was how Osomo works. Um,
if you want to read one of my even earlier ones,
I did a rewrite on electronic voting machines, but Asomo
was my first full article. The article is still up
at how stuff works dot com. But it also was
updated at some point by lee An Aubringer. So I

(01:28):
didn't I wasn't consulted about that, because that's not the
way it works. Typically when we write articles for how
stuff works. As you know, technology evolves very quickly over time,
and so articles that you write will become outdated rapidly,
and so we would frequently bring in other people to
help update articles while our staff writers like myself would

(01:50):
be on other new, big assignments. So, but this is
all about AWESOMO. So what was awesomo. The name is
actually an acronym. It stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility,
and it's a robot that's intended to interact in a
human living environment, meaning that Honda was trying to build

(02:12):
a robot that could integrate into our lives, that could
move around with human beings in a seamless way, and
it was meant to be a humanoid robot that could
interact with our environment similar to the way we humans do,
so it needed to have human like appendages. And it
turns out this is a lot easier said than done,
because a lot of consideration has to go into the

(02:34):
design of such a robot. On casual glance. Awesome, Oh,
looked like a child sized astronaut, complete with like a
space pack and a space helmet. It's humanoid, has arms
as legs as hands with fingers and thumbs, and like
I said, the head looks like a like a space
helmet that you would see an astronaut on the Moon wearing.

(02:55):
And it had it's batterying a big backpack that sat
on its back obvious lee which gave it this kind
of little estronaut looks very cute, and in fact, that
was done on purpose. They wanted the robot to look
friendly and approachable because it was meant to interact with people. UH.
Over time, the design of Osumo evolved a little bit,

(03:16):
and I'll cover some of that in this episode, but
I just want to illustrate it here with the earliest
version of the official Osomo, with the version that was
around just before they stopped production on it. In the
first robot that Honda designated as Osomo, because there were
some predecessors, UH, was born quote unquote on November two thousand.

(03:41):
It stood one twenty centimeters tall that's just a little
bit under four feet, and it weighed about fifty or
a hundred fifteen pounds. But when it was retired in
two thousand eighteen and Osumo's robots specs were a little different.
It stood one hundred thirty centimeters tall that's about four
ft three inches, so it grew a little bit, and
it weighed forty eight kilograms or about a hundred six pounds,

(04:04):
so it lost a little weight. At top speed, it
could dash at a respectable nine kilometers per hour, which
is about five point six miles per hour. Now, it's
not like it could go toe to toe with the
T one thousand from Terminator two, but it was still
pretty impressive. It was a robot that could run on
two legs, the first to do so. In fact, Honda

(04:26):
chose the robot's height carefully. They wanted to design a
robot that could work in human environments, so it couldn't
be too small, but it also shouldn't be intimidating. They
didn't want to make, you know, like a kill bot
two thousand that would be terrifying. The robot size was
determined to be people friendly because it'd be large enough
to operate environmental elements like door knobs or light switches,

(04:49):
and about four ft three inches meant that it would
also be around eye level with a seated human adults.
So if you were seated down at a desk and
Osimo walked up to you to let you know that
there was a visitor at the lobby, then you'd be
looking pretty much I too camera with Osomo. It could
also stand behind a desk and it would be at

(05:09):
about the same height as someone who was seated behind
a desk, So that made Osumo a potential receptionist, which
in fact, Honda made use of Osimo as a receptionist
at their headquarters. The robot also had several degrees of freedom. Now,
the phrase degrees of freedom actually has a couple of
different meanings depending upon what industry or context you're looking at,

(05:31):
uh including statistics. There's a specific meaning for degrees of
freedom and statistics, But in mechanical systems it refers to
the number of independent movements a rigid body is capable of.
So an unrestrained rigid body in space just imagine you've
got a cube of something and it's magically floating in
the air. It has six degrees of freedom because it

(05:54):
can move up or down like it can levitate straight
up or sink straight down. It could strafe left or
right uh, or it could move back and forth toward
you or away from you. Plus it can rotate around
those axes, which would translate to pitch roll and yaw.
So that's six different degrees of freedom. The final model

(06:17):
of Osimo had three degrees of freedom for the head,
seven degrees of freedom for each arm, so I had
two arms, thirteen degrees of freedom for each hand, two hands,
two degrees of freedom at the hip, and six degrees
of freedom for each of the legs two legs, which
meant that Osimo ultimately had fifty seven degrees of freedom

(06:37):
for the full robot, the one that was finally retired
in that was an improvement of twenty three degrees of
freedom from its predecessor. Model had twenty three degrees more
freedom than the previous version of Osomo. I'll go into
further detail about the different sensors and systems Osumo had,
but first I'd like to talk about the history of
the robot itself, and to do that we need to

(06:59):
travel back to night teen eighties six and what a
year that was, guys. I mean, you could go to
the theater and you could go see what came out
in eight six aliens you could see Ferris Bueller's Day Off,
or you could see the greatest movie made of all time,
Big Trouble in Little China. Also, Howard the Duck came
out in as I recall music in six include stuff

(07:23):
like Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer or Peter STA's Glory of Love.
Quite an amazing diddy there or cameos Immortal, classic word Up.
But more importantly for our story engineers at Honda, we're
tackling a very challenging problem. How do you make a
humanoid robot walk like a person does? So they started

(07:44):
off slowly. First, they began with designing a basic set
of robotic legs that could take steps. So their first
robot model in this phase, which was only meant for
research and development, this was never going to be something
that they were going to market, was known as the
e O and it was essentially nothing more than a
pair of legs connected to a narrow set of robot hips.

(08:06):
So just legs and hips and that's it. And it
was wired up and you had a control system that
would tell it to walk forward. The robot was connected
directly to those computer systems no wireless systems at this point,
and the legs had to be very careful, very deliberate
in their movements in order to maintain the robot's center

(08:26):
of gravity on the soles of its feet. So every
time it takes a step, it's it's removing weight from
one foot. All of its weight is on its other foot.
It had to be very careful to move its center
of gravity over the the foot that was still on
the ground. That also meant that the robot had to
continuously make adjustments to its balance as it moved the

(08:48):
free leg forward to take a step. That made taking
a single step a slow process, sometimes taking as long
as twenty seconds for one step. Now, clearly that's way
too slow for a robot to move around in a
human environment, but it was important for the research and
development phase. The robot and all future robots i'll cover

(09:09):
used servo motors for locomotion. Now, those are actuators. They're
either linear or their rotary, which tells you the type
of motion they control, and they allow for precise control
of motion, including velocity and acceleration. A servo motor uses
position feedback, which means the servo motor has to quote
unquote no, it's position so that when it receives an

(09:32):
incoming command to change positions, it can do so accurately.
So if I translate this into human terms, it's like saying,
you put your right leg in, you take your right
leg out, you put your right leg in, and then
you shake it all about. Humans typically possess a sense
that we call a proprioception. That's describes how our brains
sense our bodies, how our brains know where our limbs are.

(09:54):
This is why if you close your eyes, you can
touch your finger to your nose, assuming you're not under
of the influence of something. Because we have appropriate exception,
we know the location of each of our limbs, and
therefore we can move those limbs from where they were
to where they need to be. And that's what it's
all about. But machines do not innately possess this ability.
Engineers and computer scientists had to come up with ways

(10:16):
to mimic it, and servo motors are part of systems
that keep track of positions so that the overall system
can behave as directed. So if you tell your robot
walk forward three steps, the robot can take that command
and translate it into a series of smaller commands. If
one leg is already placed forward, then the back leg
is the one that's going to have to come up

(10:36):
and take a step for locomotion to begin. For example,
pretty much every degree of freedom has an associated servo motor.
So as ASUMO or osimo, I should say, increased in complexity,
it got more servo motors. Back to EO, The type
of walking EO could do was called static walking. Before
it could take a second step, the robot had to

(10:57):
be certain it's center of weight had shifted over the
soul of the foot it had just placed down on
the ground. This was a good start to working out
the actual mechanics of limb motion, but it was a
far cry from the way organic critters move around. The
team was gonna have to do a lot more research,
and I'll talk about that in just a second, but
first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

(11:28):
Engineers got to work analyzing the way humans, animals, and
even insects walk. They studied hours of videos to understand
what is going on from a physical or mechanical side
of things. You know, physiologically, humans don't maintain their center
of gravity directly over the souls of their feet as
they walk. The center of gravity as we walk can
move around quite a bit, so designing a robot that

(11:49):
could do this too was gonna be pretty tricky. The
robot would have to take into account a lot of
different factors that we kind of grasp innately once we
learn how to walk. That would include stuff like the
robots fed its momentum, the ground it was walking on,
whether it was level, whether it was flat, that kind
of thing. One thing the team did was study human skeletons.

(12:09):
They noted the location of the joints in the human
legs and determined that the toes play an important part
of walking as they helped guide us in the way
we support our weight from step to step, so their
robots would need to be able to do a similar thing.
The robots were also going to need degrees of freedom
similar to what you could find in a human ankle, knee,
and hip joint, so the engineers also studied walking humans

(12:32):
to determine stuff like the range of motion every joint
should be able to replicate, where the center of gravity
should be for every leg, how much torque should be
exerted on leg joints, and also the sensors that would
be needed to replicate how we humans sense, stuff like
the speed of motion and the impact of our foot
hitting the ground. All that would be very important so

(12:54):
that the robot would be able to walk in a
stable way and not just hop around or fall off
of its feet or otherwise have some disaster occur in
the engineers designed E one. This was the first of
three robots, the others being E two and E three
that the engineers designed in an effort to move from

(13:15):
the static walking model to what they called fast walking
Like EO. These robots were essentially legs attached to robotic hips,
and maybe you could argue as also sort of a
rudimentary torso, but there were no arms, there's no head,
so I was about it. Uh. Each design looked a
little bit more sophisticated than its predecessor did, but they

(13:37):
were all very almost industrial looking kind of robots. They
would would not take steps as painstakingly slowly as EO did.
They moved a bit more naturally, which for humans involves
shifting our weight forward and leaning into a step. It's
almost like we're about to fall, right like when we
take a step. It's almost as if we're leaning forward
and we're gonna fall if we don't catch ourselves, and

(13:59):
then we move a foot forward and we do catch
ourselves with our foot, and then we keep leaning forward
and we catch ourselves again with our foot. So you
can almost think of walking as consistently nearly falling over
in a way if you're looking at it from a
robotics way where you're trying to figure out how to
design a robot to do a similar thing, So it
involves a lot of almost falling and catching yourself. While

(14:21):
the robots in this phase were considered fast walkers, fast
is a relative term. The E two, for example, the
middle of the three models, was clocked at a top
speed of one point two kilometers per hour on flat surfaces,
which is about three quarters of a mile per hour.
By comparison, your average humans walking speed is right around

(14:45):
five kilometers per hour or three point one miles per hour.
So these robots weren't exactly burning up the track walking
around the work on E one through E three stretch
from seven to and then the team moved into the
next as new wave dance craze. Anyways, it's still rock
and roll to me. I don't know what happened there,

(15:05):
it's all on my notes to What I meant to
say is that they began developing the next generation of
walking robots that would be E four, E five, and
E six, and this wasn't an effort to create stabilized walking,
which meant the engineers wanted to create robots that could
remain stable while walking on a variety of surfaces, including
stuff like slopes or stairs, that they would be able
to adjust their steps and be able to keep their

(15:27):
weight centered so that they didn't fall over. These robots,
like the one through E three also looked like an
armless torso attached to legs, so still didn't look very
much like Awesomo. At this point, the E four through
E six models began to incorporate three areas of control
to achieve stabilized walking, and they are floor reaction control

(15:48):
that refers to the ability of the robot to absorb
floor unevenness through the soles of its feet in an
effort to maintain a firm stance. So the engineers had
to build sensors into the feet of the robots so
that the robot could gather information and about the floor
and then process that information in a way that was
meaningful and then adjust its stance to give the robot
the best chance of not pitching over. Next would be

(16:09):
the target zero moment point control, which is a fancy
way of saying the robot needs to be able to
balance itself, so the zero moment point refers to balancing
different forces in order to maintain posture. Those forces include
stuff like gravity and walking speed that falls into a
category called total inertial force. The other force that occurs

(16:31):
is when the robot's foot connects with the ground. That's
called the ground reaction force. And you want those two
forces to cancel one another out in order to maintain posture. Also,
the robot has to be able to detect when it
is unable to stand firmly. So first you have to
incorporate sensors that can detect and imbalance in the robot.

(16:51):
Then you have to figure out what to do without
you know, how do you address and imbalance. So with
these robots, the engineers designed a system which will allow
the robots to make adjustments to its upper body and
they would shift their upper body around to act as
a counter balance. So if it's since it was going
to fall forward, it might shift its upper body backward
to counter that action and hopefully remain upright as a result.

(17:15):
The third area of control was called foot planting location control.
This system engaged once the ZMP control had activated, and
this system would determine the length of the robot step
to catch the robot and make certain it remains upright.
So it's all about maintaining the proper relationship between the
position and speed of the robot body with the length

(17:36):
of the steps it takes. Now, up to this point,
all the robots have been prototypes to help engineers understand
the fundamentals necessary that would be needed for basic walking.
The next stage involved building robots that had arms, hands,
and a head, and that wasn't just for aesthetics, although
that did play a part in it, but it's also

(17:56):
for locomotion. We use our arms and our body in
our head while we're walking. If the engineers wanted their
robot to move like a human, they were going to
need to incorporate those elements as well. Plus, if they
wanted it to interact in human environments, they wanted it
to look not terrifying, So giving it arms in the
head was probably a step in the right direction. From

(18:17):
the team built another series of three robots. These were
designated P one, P two, and P three, and all
of them were humanoid. They were all taller and heavier
than Osumo would be, and this was when the team
was still working out the physics and mechanics of humanoid walking,
so they were more concerned with getting those elements right
rather than producing a robot that would be suitable for
human use, so again these were never intended to go

(18:39):
into the workplace. The P one humanoid robot was one
five centimeters tall that's about six ft three inches. It's
a big robot and also weighed into a hundred which
is about three eighty six pounds, so stats like that.
It could have wrestled for the w w E. Now,
clearly that type of robot would be too big and

(18:59):
heavy and potentially dangerous for a human environment. If it
lost its balance and fell, it could cause a serious injury.
But it was one of the first of Honda's robots
in this line to have arms and sort of claw
like hands, and engineers worked on coordinating arm and leg
movements and programmed the robots so it could operate simple
things like light switches and door knobs. And pick up

(19:20):
various objects, and coordinating all of that was also another
big challenge, although to be fair, the walking and running
was probably the biggest of the challenges they faced at
that point. The P two robot was the first self regulating,
two legged humanoid robot walking robot, i should say, and
it first started strutting its stuff in December n This
robot was the first to have a computer system incorporated

(19:42):
directly into the robots design. Previous robots had been controlled
by computers through a wired connection. This one was completely wireless.
The P two had a battery, It also had a
wireless radio, had motor drives, it had its control computer,
and more systems on board. Operators would say commands to
the robot through a computer, it would beam the commands over.

(20:03):
The robot would receive these commands wirelessly, and then they
would process the commands and the robot would then do
whatever it was supposed to do, including pushing carts or
climbing stairs. This robot was a little bit shorter than
the P one. It measured a hundred a D two centimeters,
so it was just a hair under six ft tall.
But putting all that on board processing capability onto the

(20:26):
robots uh skeleton meant that they added a lot of
weight to it, so it was a hefty two kilograms
or nearly four hundred sixty three pounds. I stumbled there
for a second because in my notes, just a glance
point the curtain, I wrote two ten kb. That's two bites,
No two kilograms, silly typo. The P three, which was

(20:48):
created in September, was much shorter and lighter than its predecessors.
It stood one sixty centimeters tall that's about five ft
three inches, and it weighed in a relatively sevelled hundred
third kilograms or two seven pounds. The team was able
to decentralize the control system for the P three, which
helped remove a lot of that weight that it was
carried around by the P two. Now, those robots helped

(21:11):
the engineers put together the information they needed to create
the first robot to be called Asomo. This robot would
be smaller, it would be lighter, and it would feature
a design that was meant to make it look friendly
and playful. So next I'll talk about some of the
tech that was used to make Osumo work and how
it became the first humanoid two legged robot. To run.
But first, let's take another quick break and thank our sponsor.

(21:41):
Asomo represented a big breakthrough in creating a robot that
can walk like a human can. For one thing, the
engineers developed what they called intelligent real time flexible walking
or I walk for Osomo. So Osmo can shift its
center of gravity while going through a turn, and that
allows it to make a turn in a gradual curve.
It's like it's it's leaning into the curve, which is

(22:04):
a big deal because earlier robots the only way they
could turn is they would actually have to stop moving
and then they would sort of shuffle in place. They
would stand on one foot, lift their other foot, turn
it slightly, put their other foot down, lift up their
first foot, and put it in parallel with the second foot,
and then they have to keep doing that over and
over and over again until they gradually we're facing in

(22:26):
the correct direction. So Osomo was able to do this
in a much more fluid way, one that was much
more human, which is very important if you're gonna have
it moving through human environments. It can actually calculate the
amount of momentum it will need to get through a
turn and shift its weight to help compensate for all
of that. Osomo is also the first humanoid two legged

(22:47):
robot to run. I mentioned that earlier, and by run,
I mean Osomo can move forward at a slightly accelerated
pace and in such a way that at some point
during its gait both of its feet are off the
ground at the same time. That's how they define running.
It's not by super top speed, but rather that at
some point in the in its stride, both feet are

(23:08):
actually off the ground. It happens for less than a second,
but it means that Osumo moves around with a kind
of like a little hopping motion. Some people have said
that it looks like whoever is inside the space suit
needs to go to the bathroom, but it is running.
And it's actually a big deal for robots because when
the robot has both of its feet off the ground,
it no longer has any information about its balance with

(23:30):
regard to the ground. Right it's actually completely clear of
the ground for even a split second. Osumo has to
be able to maintain it's balance and it's weight so
that doesn't spin when it goes off the ground. It
has to be able to plan a foot down for
the next step and be uh, firm enough so it
can continue it's run. And it has to do all
of this without having any touch to the ground at all.

(23:53):
And it's a pretty complicated problem to solve from an
engineering perspective. How do you get a robot so that
when it leaves the ground, it maintain aims it's orientation
so that it doesn't just twist out of the way
and then come crashing down. One thing I think is
interesting about Osmo is that it combines pregenerated environmental models
and the ability to recognize things within an environment. Now

(24:14):
by that, I mean you can't just PLoP Osomo down
into a brand new space and expect the robot to
seamlessly navigate through various interactions. Osumo is not autonomous. It's
not an autonomous robot. It cannot operate all on its own. Instead,
it relies on a combination of programming, an operator who
can run Osomo from a computer sort of like a

(24:36):
remote controlled vehicle or both, in addition to its own ability,
so it can respond to things like verbal commands and
gesture commands. So it could do all those, but it
can't do stuff on its own. This does not mean
it's not an impressive technology. This is very impressive. If
you were to take control of Osumo and make it
walk forward, it could actually adjust its own steps to

(24:57):
meet your commands, which might include move having a leg
a certain way to avoid an obstacle while still navigating
to the location you guide it to. So, in other words,
Osmo can make small decisions like where it needs to
move body parts in order to continue to fulfill whatever
the command was that was given to it. But it
can't decide to do something all on its own. It's

(25:20):
making these smaller decisions about minute stuff within the context
of a larger command. To do things like navigate stairways.
You typically would program Osumo to have a working knowledge
of the environment before having it moved through the room.
That helps Osumo's navigational systems as well as it means
the robot knows where things are supposed to be and

(25:41):
can compare where things really are against that model in
order to make decisions. So, for example, let's say you
have Osumo walking around a hotel lobby greeting guests, and
one morning, some guests have moved a few of the
chairs so that they can sit together. But the chairs
are no longer where they used to be in Osomo's
little preplanned man model of the hotel lobby, and if

(26:02):
it only worked off of that pre program model, then
it would try and walk around chairs that weren't actually there,
or it would bump into chairs that had been moved.
But Osomo can also use its sensors, which I'm going
to talk about in the second, to locate obstacles and
navigate around them within the context of the room, and
knows how far out the way it can go in
any given direction. To plot out its path, typically you

(26:23):
would also mark a room with certain types of markers
that Osomo can detect, and that gives Osumo more precise
information about where it is in context of other things
inside the room. Generally speaking, Osumo tries to take the
pathway that will require the fewest number of steps or
the least amount of work. And it's not that Osmo
is lazy, but rather it has a fifty one point

(26:44):
eight volt lithium ion battery and that's good for about
one hour of operation, so it takes about three hours
to recharge it. So Osumo wants to make the most
out of its brief moments of wakefulness. So note to self,
if I ever get an Osumo, make sure I also
pick up a couple of extra batteries, so I always
have one charged. Those batteries, by the way, account for
nearly six kilograms of Ozumo's weight, or about thirteen pounds.

(27:06):
So let's talk about some of the sensors Ozomo has
to help it navigate an environment. In order to maintain
its balance, Osmo has a gyroscope, and gyroscopes are devices
that measure or maintain rotational motion, and they have some
interesting properties that, on a casual glance, seemed to defy
common sense. A gyroscope works on the principle of angular
velocity around an axis of rotation. So imagine you've got

(27:28):
a bike wheel and you have an axle, and the
bike wheel can rotate freely around the axle. So you're
holding it up right with one hand on either side
of this axle. You're holding it up in front of you,
and your friend gives the wheel a really good spin.
You're holding it vertically. You then attach a string to
one side of the axle of this upright wheel, and

(27:48):
your hand is still on the other side. Now, what
would happen if you were to let go of the axle?
And you might think that, well, the wheel is just
gonna flop over horizontally, but it doesn't. The wheel, as
long as it's rotating rounds axle will remain upright, and
that effect is called precession. A spinning gyroscope will uh
is stable, and once the gyroscope is spinning, it has

(28:11):
a tendency to remain in the same orientation, and any
force applied to change the orientation of the spin axis
is met with a resistive force. So let's say you're
still holding both sides of the axle of this bicycle
wheel and your friend gives it a really good spin.
You're holding it vertically, and then you try to turn
the wheel horizontally while it's still spinning. You would actually

(28:31):
feel resistance to this. This is what actually makes it
easy to ride a bicycle. Once you really get going,
the rotation of the wheels along their spin access will
help keep you upright. In addition to the gyroscope, Osomo
has an accelerometer which measures acceleration. Acceleration refers to a
change in velocity, so that could be either in speed
or direction or both. Osamo also has a six as

(28:54):
to six access force sensors that's for detecting the direction
and amount of force that the hand ends encounter. Uh.
They also actually have two more for the feet. I
forgot about that, So technically it's got four six access
force sensors. Osmo also has cameras to provide a stereoscopic
view of its surroundings that allows Ozomo to judge the

(29:14):
depth of a scene and determine which objects are close
to it, which one versus which ones are further away.
The systems on board Osmo also have facial recognition capabilities
and allow the robot to recognize objects that are in motion,
and it can also respond to gesture commands like waving.
So if you wave at Osmo, it can wave back
at you and recognizes that as a gesture command. Osmo

(29:34):
also has environment identifying sensors, including ultrasonic sensors that can
detect obstacles that are up to three meters ahead of it,
including glass. Because you know, it works off echolocation, it's
not optical. They are also laser sensors and infrared sensors
to help the robot detect the ground. Osimo frequently navigates
by referencing those markings on the ground I mentioned before.

(29:56):
The infrared sensor can detect those and that tells Ozomo
it's in the place, or that it needs to move
in a certain area that may not be in the
location it thought it was. The ground sensor is located
at the base of Osomo's torso, and there are ultrasonic
sensors in an array both on the front and the
backside of Osumo. Osmo also has three microphones that allow

(30:16):
it to detect noise and determine the origin of the noise,
as well as to receive voice commands. And for a while,
you could meet Osumo at Disneyland Interventions in an attraction
titled Say Hello to Honda's Asumo, and I did. I
got to meet Osmo. I just went to watch the
live show and that's all I was gonna do, is was
was just watch it and walk away. But a cast

(30:37):
member was talking to me and I mentioned that I
had written an article about how Ozomo works, and they said,
would you like to meet Osumo? And I said yes,
I would please, and so they introduced me and I
got to meet Osumo. Osmo, by the way, you can
still be seen at Disneyland's Autopia, but Osumo itself is
no longer in production. Instead, Honda plans to incorporate the
technology and discoveries made during developing the robot into stuff

(31:01):
like the unicub device or the walking assist Harness and
Honda introduced four new helper robot concepts at CE, and
all of them seem to incorporate some elements of Osmo's
design in them. So Osumo lives on in a way,
but in new products, though the form factor of the
childlike space man appears to be a thing in the past.

(31:22):
So farewell, Osumo. You're really good to me. I appreciate
you giving me my first writing assignment here at how
Stuff Works, and thank you Cat for suggesting the topic.
It was a lot of fun to go back and
revisit this and watch videos of Osimo running around and
sometimes toppling over. It's sad to see, but you know,
technology doesn't always work the way you wanted to, and

(31:42):
it's good to remind ourselves of that from time to time.
If you have any suggestions for topics I should tackle
in future episodes of tech Stuff, write me and let
me know. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff
Works dot com, or you can drop me a line
on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those
is tech Stuff H. S W. Don't forget to follow
the show over on Instagram and I'll talk to you

(32:03):
again really soon. For more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com