Boston Dynamics added an AI brain to their Atlas robot

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) declared their collaboration to create humanoid robots. While TRI will make use of their industry-leading Large Behavior Models, Boston Dynamics will provide its new electric Atlas robot AI for the task.

For more than 30 years, Boston Dynamics, a 1992 spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has led the way in the advancement of robotics technology. With the release of the BigDog or LittleDog quadrupedal systems in 2009, it shot to fame. In 2013, it unveiled the initial version of its bipedal Atlas platform. Over the course of the last ten years, Atlas' skills have steadily improved, allowing the robot to carry out more challenging acrobatics and dexterity activities, such as dancing, backflipping, and traversing virtual building sites.

The business replaced its old hydraulic Atlas platform with a new one powered by electric servos in April 2024. According to the manufacturer, the electric Atlas is among the most sophisticated humanoid robots ever created, with movement skills that surpass those of a person.

However, TRI is at the vanguard of the creation of Large Behavior Models, or LBMs. As LLMs are to chatbots, LBMs are to robots. Large-scale human behavior datasets are used to train LBMs, which allow robots to move and behave like humans, in the same way as huge multimodal datasets teach LLMs to respond to humans in human-like ways. They also support robots' ability to generalize across tasks and acquire new behaviors. The announcement blog states that the goal of TRI's work on LBMs is to develop foundation models enabling dexterous manipulation that are multitask, vision- and language-conditioned.

According to Gill Pratt, CEO of TRI and head scientist at Toyota, new developments in AI-powered robots and machine learning have enormous promise to increase physical intelligence. As they strive to magnify people and enhance quality of life, the chance to integrate TRI's cutting-edge AI technology on Boston Dynamics' hardware is revolutionary for each of their businesses.