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Asimo walks out from behind the arras. The head swivels, the eyes look around, and Asimo takes a series of steps towards a flight of steps. A pause. Then the little humanoid walks up the steps, turns around, pauses to eye up the steps again, then sets off on a slow but fluent walk down. You might have seen this trick on the telly advert or in downloaded MPEGs, but honestly the live performance takes your breath away.

Yet I don't think the sense of wonder stems from what a miraculous creation Asimo is. The true wonder occurs when Asimo makes you realise what an infinitely more miraculous creation you are. This is the most advanced humanoid robot, and it is no less than staggering what it can do.

Yet it's all stuff most of us can do so naturally we don't give it a second's thought. Just the walking thing, that's remarkable. It's not a clunky two-dimensional clump. No, to keep balance, the little plastic fellow sways his hips and swings his arms.

Even children - who are always a lot less impressed than we are by technology because they haven't lived in a world without it - tend to assume that Asimo is a costume worn by a short actor. There's no one in there kids. It's all motors and processors.

Asimo, of course, doesn't 'think'. The walking is 'intelligent' in that the cameras in its head feed into a processor that constructs a mathematical model of the surroundings - the position and height of each stair, for instance. The walk is adaptive, so the balancing is done real-time and Asimo can even walk over rough ground, or grip your hand and follow you.

All that processing is done on-board. But, though voice control is being developed, at the moment the commands - walk, turn, wave - are radioed from behind the curtain by a couple of technicians with laptops.

This is the fruit of 21 years of research at Honda, an ongoing project that currently involves teams at three of its labs in Japan, the US and Europe. The company won't divulge exactly how many engineers it has committed, nor the exact size of the huge budget, but the Asimo project also collaborates with, and funds dozens of, outside universities and institutions. This is a serious effort, even by the standards of global car-company R&D. Asimo isn't a one-off: thereare 40 of him at work around the world.

Why make the thing humanoid? After all, some sort of wheeled locomotion wouldn't have taken 21 years of toil. In 1986 when the project started, a walking biped wasn't thought possible, and Honda likes a challenge. It's the same spirit that takes them into motorsport: learn how to solve problems faster and more creatively, then see the process and the motivation cascading through the company.

But also, a biped is somehow more friendly. That's why prop makers gave C-3PO legs and Daleks wheels. We can predict from the body language what a biped is going to do next. A wheeled robot can scoot off in any direction. Finally, a robot that resembles humans will be better adapted to working in an environment designed for humans: our homes and workplaces.

So here we are, 21 years into this massive effort, with a robot that can stagger us with its ability to get about. Honda says it'll take about another 15 before the Asimo teams have reached the original goal: 'to create a robot to help people in their daily lives'. You can see there's a sort of half-way point here. Asimo has acquired locomotion (well, until his battery goes flat he has). Now Asimo needs perception, discernment, intelligence.