Boston Dynamics has equipped its robot Atlas with artificial intelligence

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced Tuesday that they are collaborating to develop general purpose humanoid robots. Boston Dynamics will contribute with its new The Atlas electric robot will handle this challenge, and TRI will leverage its industry-leading large behavioral models.

Founded in 1992 as a spinout of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston Dynamics has been at the forefront of robotics development for more than 30 years. It burst into the mainstream in 2009 with the BigDog and LittleDog quadruped systems, and debuted the first iteration of the Atlas bipedal platform in 2013. Over the past decade, Atlas’s capabilities have continually evolved, allowing the robot to perform increasingly complex feats and agility, from dancing and somersaulting to mastering parkour and navigating simulated construction sites.

In April 2024, the company abandoned the outdated Atlas hydraulic platform in favor of a new generation with electric servos. The company describes Electric Atlas as “one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever created” that is “capable of moving in ways that exceed human capabilities.”

TRI, on the other hand, is at the forefront of developing large Behavior patterns (LME). LBM is to robotics what LLM is to chatbots. Just as LLMs are trained on huge sets of multimodal data to respond to humans in a human-like manner, LBMs are trained on huge sets of human behavior, allowing robots to move and act just like humans. They also help robots learn new behaviors and generalize between tasks. According to the blog post, “TRI’s work on LBM aims to create multi-tasking, vision- and language-based core models for dexterity manipulation.”

“The latest advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enormous potential for the development of physical intelligence,” said Jill PrattToyota’s chief scientist and CEO of TRI, in a statement. “The ability to deploy TRI’s next-generation AI technology on Boston Dynamics hardware is a game-changer for each of our organizations as we work to empower people and improve quality of life.”

The news comes amid a growing number of companies looking to add robots to the workforce of the future. For example, Agility Robotics’ Digit and 02 models are already being tested in industrial settings such as BMW’s Spartanburg plant in South Carolina and the Spanx manufacturing facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Apparently, Tesla Optimus is also in development, although even the latest models still have to be controlled remotely for more than just the most basic tasks.