Boston Dynamics unveiled the latest version of its humanoid Atlas robot Monday at CES in Las Vegas. The robot, with a glowing circle for a face, a fully electric, battery-powered body, and joints that can rotate 360 degrees, is so advanced that it will soon be working alongside human factory workers for parent company Hyundai, the companies claimed.
Hyundai said it plans on mass-producing Atlas as “production-ready humanoid robots” that will be put to work at the automaker’s car plants, starting with the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant in Savannah, Georgia. The company estimates it will produce 30,000 robots annually starting in 2028.
The company also plans on putting the first Atlas robots to work that year “on processes with proven safety and quality benefits, such as parts sequencing.” By 2030, Hyundai says that Atlas will level up to tasks involving “repetitive motions, heavy loads, and other complex operations.” The automaker envisions a “harmonious collaboration between humans and robots,” despite widespread fears about job losses as a result of increased automation.
Hyundai kicked off its keynote with a K-pop dance number featuring its Spot robots (which lasted about as long as one of the robots took to open a door afterward). The star of the show was a remotely-piloted Atlas prototype making its public debut. A future production model that will actually be rolling out to Hyundai and other customers was also shown off, albeit static and non-working.
The polished product version of Atlas will be water resistant and capable of withstanding temperatures down to -4 degrees and up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. It also features tactile sensing in its hands and will swap out its own batteries when they start running low. It had less exposed wiring than the prototype and baby blue panels covering some parts of its body.
1/5Image: Dominic Preston / The Verge
Boston Dynamics started as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. The company used funding from DARPA to create robots like BigDog, but is best known for the viral fame its robots have found online. Its two main stars have been Atlas, a humanoid bipedal robot that can run and do backflips, and Spot, a smaller quadrupedal “dog” that’s been tested in a variety of scenarios, from sheep herding to assisting health care workers during the pandemic.
The company started selling Spot in June 2020 for $74,500, targeting businesses looking for an automated way to patrol and inspect warehouses. Despite the viral fame, Boston Dynamics has consistently lost millions of dollars annually for a number of years.
Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics in 2021 in a deal that valued the company at $1.1 billion. The automaker has long predicted that robots will become an increasingly noticeable presence at its factories over time. And with today’s demonstration, Hyundai is hoping to prove that its robot is more advanced and more capable of performing physical tasks than rivals like Tesla’s Optimus robot. Tesla has ridden a wave of AI hype in recent years to a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, over 15 times Hyundai’s value, despite selling vastly fewer cars.
By 2030, Hyundai says that Atlas will level up to tasks involving “repetitive motions, heavy loads, and other complex operations.”
The shift for Atlas from research platform to commercial robot is certainly a significant milestone for Boston Dynamics and its parent company. It’s also likely to be an extremely costly endeavor for Hyundai to put Atlas into volume production. The companies haven’t said how much Atlas costs to manufacture, but Boston Dynamics does sell its Spot robots for around $75,000 a unit. Atlas is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars more expensive.
Hyundai claims its supply chain, access to advanced manufacturing facilities, and previous work on AI-based software and software-defined vehicles give it a unique advantage that will enable it to scale up its robot production while also keeping costs low.
Those costs are likely to rise as Atlas becomes more dextrous and autonomous. Hyundai said that the latest, all-electric version of the robot has 56 degrees of freedom (DoF), up from the 50 DoF that was reported in April 2025. The robot has fully rotational joints and “human-scale hands with tactile sensing” and is engineered to handle tasks autonomously. It can be taught “most tasks” in a day, can replace its own batteries automatically for all-day continuous use, and can lift up to 110 pounds (50kg). It’s also water resistant and can operate in temperatures as low as -4 and as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 40 degrees Celsius).
For years, Boston Dynamics has impressed with demonstrations of its dexterous biped bots performing cartwheels, breakdances, and barrel rolls. Still, the news that Hyundai is on the cusp of putting Atlas to work at its factories may change the public’s perception of the seemingly friendly robot, especially if it emerges as a potential Terminator of jobs. Amazon, for example, is hoping its robots can replace more than 600,000 jobs in the US by 2033, according to recently leaked strategy documents. Hyundai has said that by 2028, its $21 billion investment in the US will create 14,000 jobs directly, and more than 100,000 if indirect jobs are included.
Hyundai is also announcing a partnership with Google’s DeepMind AI research lab to combine Boston Dynamics’ robotic expertise with Google’s AI foundation models. The automaker is also sourcing AI chips and software from Nvidia.
Of course, shifting from impressive demos to a working product that can justify its enormous costs will be an equally enormous challenge for Hyundai and Boston Dynamics. There is a lot of hype around humanoid robots, and not a lot of evidence that they’re worth the complexity and effort to build them — yet.
With additional reporting by Stevie Bonifield
Source: www.theverge.com
