Honda P2

What the P2 was

The P2 is a humanoid robot that Honda announced in December 1996. Honda described it as the world's first bipedal humanoid walking robot ^[1]. It stood 1,820 mm tall and weighed 210 kg ^[1]: about the height of an adult person, and several times a person's weight.

The P2 was not the first walking machine Honda built. The company says an earlier robot in the same programme, the E2, achieved dynamic walking at 1.2 km/h during the 1986–1991 phase ^[2].

Static and dynamic walking

The difference between those two words explains much of what the P2 was about. A static gait keeps the robot's centre of mass over its supporting foot at all times: the machine shifts its weight to one side, lifts the other leg, puts it down, and only then moves on. It is safe and comparatively easy to control, but it is slow, and on a human-shaped robot it looks like shuffling.

A dynamic gait works the other way around. The robot lets its body tip forward and uses the momentum of that movement, with the next footfall catching the fall before it becomes one. This is much closer to how people actually walk, and it is harder to control, because for part of every step the machine is in the middle of falling and has to recover. Honda says the P2 walked with a natural, human-like dynamic gait, in contrast to the static shuffling gait that was typical of bipedal robots at the time ^[2].

What it could do

Honda says the P2 could walk freely, climb up and down stairs and push carts, wirelessly and automatically ^[1].

The word "wirelessly" carries a good deal of the engineering. To make the robot wireless, Honda placed the computers, the motor drives, the batteries and the wireless equipment inside the torso ^[1], so that everything the machine needed in order to operate travelled with it rather than sitting outside the body. Fitting power, computation and control into a human-sized frame is one of the reasons the robot weighed 210 kg ^[1].

Honda released a demonstration video of the P2 in December 1996 ^[2]. For a walking robot, footage is the natural way to make a result visible: the quality of a gait is hard to convey in a specification sheet, and easy to see in a machine going up a staircase or leaning its weight into a cart.

Where it sits in the story

Honda says the P2 led to the birth of ASIMO four years later ^[2]. That places the robot at the point where a long research effort turned into a public-facing line of machines, and it is the walk rather than the shell that carries over: the argument the P2 was making is that a humanoid robot could balance and move in a way that resembled a person.

The P2 was also recognised as an IEEE Milestone in April 2026, and Honda received a plaque at a ceremony on 28 April 2026 at the Honda Wako Building ^[2]. The IEEE Milestone programme marks technical achievements judged to be of lasting historical significance in electrical and electronic engineering, so the designation treats the P2 as a landmark in the history of robotics rather than only as a company product. Read together, the two endings are consistent: a machine announced as the first of its kind ^[1], remembered decades later as the step that made the next humanoid possible ^[2].