The first humanoid robots: a short, sourced history

"First humanoid robot" has three defensible answers, and the right one depends on which test you apply.

• WABOT-1, Waseda University, completed 1973. The first full-scale machine with a human body plan that walked, gripped objects, measured distances and communicated in Japanese.
• Honda P2, December 1996. The first two-legged walking robot that regulated itself, no cable to a control room.
• ASIMO, October 2000. The one almost everybody pictures, and the answer to the search "humanoid robot created by Honda in 2000."

Everything below is the ledger behind those three lines. The dates are checkable, the sources are linked, and where sources disagree with each other, I say so instead of picking the tidier year.

The ledger, dated

Milestone	Machine	Date	Built by	What it actually did
Earliest humanoid automaton design	Mechanical knight	c. 1495	Leonardo da Vinci	Sat up, moved its arms and hinged jaw, driven by pulleys. Prototype likely built; the sketches were only pieced together in the 1950s
The word "robot"	R.U.R. (a play)	first staged Jan 2, 1921	Karel Čapek	No machine at all. A stage play that gave the language the word
First British robot	Eric	1928	W. H. Richards and Alan Reffell	Stood, bowed, delivered a four minute address. Could not walk; the voice arrived by radio
The pre-war showpiece	Elektro	built 1937 to 1938, shown 1939	Westinghouse	Seven feet, 265 lb. Walked on voice command and "spoke" about 700 words off a 78 rpm record player
First full-scale anthropomorphic robot	WABOT-1	1973	Waseda University (Ichiro Kato)	Walked, gripped, ranged objects with a vision system, conversed in Japanese
First musician humanoid	WABOT-2	1984	Waseda University	Read a printed score with its eye and played an electronic organ
First self-regulating two-legged walker	Honda P2	December 1996	Honda	Six feet, 463 lb, all its computing and power on board
First fully independent bipedal humanoid	Honda P3	September 1997	Honda	Five feet four, 287 lb. Smaller, and the direct template for what came next
The famous one	ASIMO	October 2000	Honda	130 cm, 54 kg, eventually ran. Never sold to the public

Before anyone said "robot"

Leonardo's knight is the oldest entry with a real claim to a human body plan, and also the shakiest, because what survives is drawings. Carlo Pedretti found the fragmented sketches in the 1950s and Mark Rosheim worked from 1993 to reconstruct the mechanism, so working versions exist now. Whether a complete one stood in Milan around 1495 is a reasonable inference rather than a documented event.

Eric and Elektro are the ancestors nobody in robotics wants to talk about, because they are theater. Eric bowed and gave a speech in 1928 at the Society of Model Engineers exhibition in London, and the speech came in over radio from a man in another room. Elektro drew crowds at the 1939 New York World's Fair with a 700-word vocabulary stored on records, and Westinghouse gave it a robot dog, Sparko, the following year.

Neither machine decided anything. That is the through line from 1928 to the demo videos of 2026, and the reason this site keeps a separate page on how autonomous these things actually are.

Walker C: "Welcome to the China Pavilion!" As China Pavilion's first embodied AI "Tour Guide," humanoid robot Walker C will be officially on duty for the next 6 months at #ChinaPavilion #Expo2025Osaka! (@UBTECHRobotics, 2025-04-14)

WABOT-1 (1973): the answer I would defend

Waseda University's WABOT-1 is where the modern field starts. It had three subsystems that map cleanly onto what a humanoid still needs: limb control, vision, and conversation. It took steps on two legs, gripped objects with tactile-equipped hands, judged distance and direction with external receptors, and held a simple exchange in Japanese. Waseda's own write-up rates its mental faculties at roughly those of a one-and-a-half-year-old child, which is both a boast and an admission.

One caveat for anyone citing this page: the year moves depending on the source. Waseda's institute puts the project at 1970 to 1973 and the university's 50-year retrospective says "Completed in 1973 at Waseda, WABOT-1 is widely considered the world's first full-scale humanoid robot." Wikipedia's humanoid robot entry dates the project's start to 1967 and completion to 1972. I use 1973, because it is the institution's own number.

WABOT-2 followed in 1984 and is the more charming machine: it read a printed music score with its eye and played an electronic organ, and it went in front of the public at Expo '85 in Tsukuba. Specialist, not general. That distinction has never stopped being relevant.

Honda's secret decade (1986 to 1997)

Honda started humanoid work in 1986, when it set up a research center for fundamental technologies. Nothing came out for seven years. P1, built in 1993, stayed secret until 1996.

Then December 1996, and P2, which Wikipedia's Honda P series entry describes as "the first self-regulating, two-legged walking robot." Six feet tall, 463 pounds, with the computers, batteries and radio link on board rather than trailing off to a lab bench. That is the real break in the history, because a robot that carries its own support equipment can walk somewhere. P3 arrived in September 1997, at five feet four and 287 pounds, and Wikipedia's entry calls it "the first completely independent bi-pedal humanoid walking robot."

Three years after that, Honda shrank the thing again and gave it a name.

ASIMO (October 2000): the one everybody means

ASIMO stood 130 cm and weighed 54 kg. It walked, then ran, then climbed stairs in front of audiences for two decades, and 20 units of the first model were built in 2002.

The retirement numbers are the useful part, and they come from Honda's own ASIMO page: daily demonstrations for more than 20 years, 33.26 million steps, 7,907 km covered, on the back of more than 25 years of bipedal research. Honda said in July 2018 that it was ending ASIMO development and production, and the robot made its last active appearance in March 2022.

Note what is missing from that paragraph. No unit price, no order page, no customer. ASIMO was a demonstration program for its entire life, and so was every other machine in the ledger above, and so is Sophia, ten years on and still sold by quote only. That is why the modern price tags matter more than the modern walking.

2013 onward: the DARPA years

Boston Dynamics unveiled Atlas on July 11, 2013, and Atlas units programmed by six different teams competed in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which put humanoids to work on doors, valves and vehicles instead of stairs and dance floors. The hydraulic Atlas was retired on April 16, 2024, with a fully electric successor announced the next day, April 17, 2024.

That decade is when the walking problem stopped being the interesting problem. The interesting problem moved to the hands, where it has stubbornly stayed. That is a separate piece: why hands are the hardest part of a humanoid.

The part that is actually new: a price

Checked today, 2026-08-07, on the makers' own pages:

• Unitree G1, $13,500 on Unitree's store, backordered. It launched in May 2024 at $16,000, so this price moved down over two years, which almost nothing here does. Tracker row: Unitree G1.
• 1X NEO, $20,000 outright or $499 per month on 1X's order page, against a $200 fully refundable deposit, with the page reading "US Deliveries start 2026." Tracker row: 1X Neo.

Fifty-three years separate WABOT-1 from an order button. The full spread of what these machines cost, including the ones with no price at all, is in how much a humanoid robot costs.

The first that has not happened yet

No consumer has been independently documented taking delivery of a general-purpose home humanoid and having it work through a day of household chores unsupervised. As of the last tracker check on 2026-08-04, NEO's verified consumer deliveries stand at zero. Whichever machine gets there earns a bigger date than 1973, 1996 or 2000, and it goes to whichever company survives long enough to reach it. The field's record on that second condition is worth reading: the consumer robot graveyard.

Spotted an earlier claim with better paperwork than the ones on this page? Send it. Dated primary sources only, and I will amend the ledger.