This is as close as I have gotten to owning an Asimo, even if it’s only the battery charger. Let’s see how it’s built and what it can tell us about the rest of the robot!

The label on the bottom mentions two important specs: 58.8V and 16A. Most places online list the battery at 51.8-V, which is most likely the nominal bus voltage. Input side 15A is the safe limit of a normal household outlet. I am pretty surprised Asimo’s battery could charge at this rate! Unfortunately I cannot find the capacity of Asimo(2009)’s battery pack, but maybe I can estimate it from the charge rate.

3 hours charge time (from Asimo website) at 15A is 45 Ah which depending on if you use the nominal or max voltage, gives us a capacity of approximately 2.3 kWh to 2.6 kWh. The pack weight is 6 kg (once again from the Asimo website). Based on that mass I would expect the capacity to be closer to 1.5 kWh. The difference in those two estimates is most likely from the charge rate being slower at the beginning and at the end of charging and not just a constant value.

https://groups.oist.jp/resource-center/japanese-year-converter

The other interesting info from this label are the serial number and date of manufacture. My first thought when I saw 18 in “TES0186-080” was the year 2006. There was an Asimo revision unveiled in 2007 and it was the first to have an autonomous charging dock. Maybe that was the design date? I am more confident this is the 80th charger assembled of this design. This hints at there being a lot of Asimo’s. I’ve seen interviews from 2004-2006 that estimated just over a hundred were made at that time.

Still working on identifying this connector. Power is doubled up 14AWG. The yellow wires are the cell taps. The cell balancer is actually in the charger instead of the battery itself. I will check to see if there are any extra signals on that connector when I get further into disassembly (for example, there could be some temperature signals intermixed with those cell taps).

And now I remember why this had been on hold. All the bolts are “Torx Security” except for the bolts that cover the battery connector and two little pop out panels covering debug connectors