Japan is the leader in the industry of humanoid robotics, although other countries have made significant progress. One of the best and easily recognizable humanoid robots that comes from Japan is Honda's Asimo and it looks like the engineers are using Ubuntu for some of their tasks.

Asimo is not the precursor of the Terminator and for now it's relatively dependable on human programming, which seems to be done with the help of Ubuntu. A Softpedia reader pointed out that the Ubuntu OS has been spotted in a YouTube video about all the robotics advancements made so far.

The engineers at Honda rely on a variety of operating systems to do their job and Ubuntu is one of them. From what can be discerned in the video, it's most likely Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10. That's a very old system, but the age of the video is not known. In any case, even if this is an old video, there is no reason to think that they've stopped using it.

Just last week we saw Debian being used in the latest Luc Besson film, Lucy. Linux-based systems are making their way into the culture and they are being used for all kinds of interesting things. If you happen to spot a Linux OS, leave a comment below and we'll make sure to publish it, if it's cool enough.