Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics unveiled its humanoid robot Atlas for the first time in public on Monday at CES in Las Vegas. The demonstration took place in a hotel ballroom, where the company showed a life-sized robot with two arms and two legs picking itself up from the floor and then walking around the stage.
“For the first time ever in public, please welcome Atlas to the stage,” said Boston Dynamics general manager for humanoid robots Zachary Jackowski as Atlas rose and began moving. Over several minutes, Atlas walked around, sometimes waved to the crowd, and swiveling its head like an owl, while an engineer remotely piloted the robot from nearby for the purpose of the demonstration.
Jackowski said the company’s Atlas will move around on its own in real life. He introduced the next steps for the project as well, with Boston Dynamics saying that a product version meant to help assemble cars is already in production and will be deployed by 2028 at Hyundai’s electric vehicle manufacturing facility near Savannah, Georgia.
The Atlas rollout is part of an intensifying competition among humanoid robot makers, including Tesla and others, that are working to build robots that look like people and perform tasks that people do. Boston Dynamics is based in Massachusetts and has been developing robots for decades, with Spot described as its best-known earlier commercial product—a dog-like robot.
In a prelude to Atlas, four Spot robots opened Hyundai’s event by dancing in synchrony to a K-pop song. At CES, Hyundai also announced a partnership with Google’s DeepMind to supply artificial intelligence technology to Boston Dynamics robots, which the report described as a return to Google’s earlier involvement: Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 and later sold it to SoftBank, and Hyundai acquired it from SoftBank in 2021.
Toward the end of the live demonstration, which the report said appeared flawless, Atlas swung its arms in a theatrical gesture to introduce a static model of the new product version. That model was described as blue and looking slightly different from the robot shown in motion.
Speaking at CES earlier in the day, Alex Panas, a partner at consultancy McKinsey who helped lead a robotics panel that drew hundreds of people, focused on the path from demonstrations to practical work. Panas said, “I think the question comes back to what are the use cases and where is the applicability of the technology,” adding, “In some cases, it may look more humanoid. In some cases, it may not.”
Panas also argued that the technology stack behind humanoid robots is progressing, saying, “the software, the chipsets, the communication, all the other pieces of the technology are coming together, and they will create new applications.” The report said humanoids do not yet have enough dexterity to threaten many human jobs, and that debates over their employment impact are likely to expand as the robots become more capable.
While Hyundai plans to test Atlas at its Georgia facility, the report noted that the same plant location was the site of a federal immigration raid last year. That raid led to the arrests of hundreds of workers, including more than 300 South Korean citizens.
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