Boston Dynamics
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Boston Dynamics is an American engineering and robotics company headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, known for developing some of the most advanced legged and mobile robots in the world. Founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the company has built a reputation for pushing the boundaries of robot mobility, dexterity, and intelligence.[1][2] Its robots, including Spot, Atlas, and Stretch, have become some of the most recognized machines in robotics, frequently appearing in viral videos that demonstrate feats of balance, agility, and dynamic movement.[1]
The company has changed hands multiple times over its history. Google (through its X division) acquired it in December 2013,[1] SoftBank Group purchased it in June 2017,[9][10] and Hyundai Motor Group completed the acquisition of an 80% controlling stake in June 2021, valuing the company at approximately $1.1 billion.[6][8] As of 2026, Boston Dynamics employs roughly 1,440 people and operates commercially with Spot, Stretch, and a production version of the all-electric Atlas humanoid that began shipping to Hyundai factories and to Google DeepMind in early 2026.[15]
For more than three decades the company sat at the intersection of academic robotics research, defense funding, and consumer-facing internet culture. Its YouTube channel transformed obscure laboratory demonstrations into mainstream entertainment, with single videos drawing tens of millions of views. The company's transition from a research lab funded primarily by DARPA to a commercial robotics manufacturer with thousands of robots in customer hands marked one of the most consequential shifts in the modern robotics industry.[1]
Boston Dynamics traces its roots to the Leg Laboratory (Leg Lab), a research group that Marc Raibert founded at Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 and later moved to MIT in 1986.[4][5] The Leg Lab pioneered work on dynamically balanced legged locomotion, developing the first self-balancing hopping robots.[4] These machines demonstrated that robots could maintain balance through active control rather than static stability, a concept that became foundational to all of Boston Dynamics' later work. Earlier robots had relied on broad polygons of support and slow, statically stable gaits; Raibert's hoppers showed that a one-legged or two-legged robot could remain upright by continuously adjusting in response to the same physical principles that govern animal locomotion.
Raibert held positions as an associate professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon from 1980 to 1986, and then as a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT from 1986 to 1995.[4][5] He spun the company off from MIT in 1992.[1][4] By 1995, Boston Dynamics had fully separated from the university and began operating independently. Nancy Cornelius, a former Leg Lab researcher, served as the company's first employee and a co-founder. Robert Playter, who had completed his PhD with Raibert in the Leg Laboratory, joined a few months later as another co-founder; he would eventually become CEO in 2019.[1]
In its early years, the company focused on simulation software and consulting, developing tools for realistic 3D simulations of human and animal movement. Boston Dynamics built simulation software for the U.S. Navy, NASA, and entertainment companies, and provided consulting on biomechanical modeling.[1][3] This simulation expertise gave the team deep insight into the biomechanics that would later inform their physical robot designs.
Boston Dynamics gained widespread attention in the mid-2000s through contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). These contracts funded the development of some of the company's most iconic early robots, beginning with BigDog in 2005.[1][28] The company's DARPA-funded projects established it as a leader in legged robotics and dynamic locomotion, attracting significant media attention and public interest in the process.
During this period, Boston Dynamics also developed PETMAN (Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin), a bipedal robot funded by a $26.3 million U.S. Army contract through the Joint Service Aircrew Mask Test System program.[1] PETMAN became the first anthropomorphic robot that moved dynamically like a human, walking on a treadmill and eventually running at speeds up to 7 kilometers per hour.[1] The technology developed for PETMAN served as a direct precursor to the Atlas humanoid robot.[30]
Other DARPA-funded projects from this era included RiSE, a six-legged robot designed to climb vertical surfaces; LittleDog, a small quadruped platform used by external research teams for software testing; RHex, a 30-pound, six-legged robot designed for rough-terrain mobility; and SandFlea, an 11-pound wheeled robot capable of jumping vertically up to 30 feet using a piston-powered launching mechanism.[1] While many of these platforms never moved beyond the research lab, they collectively pushed the field's understanding of legged and dynamic locomotion forward.
On December 13, 2013, Google X (later renamed X, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.) acquired Boston Dynamics as part of a broader push into robotics led by Andy Rubin, the creator of Android.[1] Google acquired roughly eight robotics companies in late 2013, including Schaft, Industrial Perception, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss, and Redwood Robotics, but the Boston Dynamics purchase was the most high-profile.[1] The financial terms were never disclosed.[1]
The acquisition signaled major corporate interest in advanced robotics, though Google never publicly deployed Boston Dynamics robots in its products or services. Andy Rubin departed Google in October 2014, and the broader "Replicant" robotics initiative he had assembled gradually lost momentum within Alphabet.[1] By March 2016, Bloomberg reported that Alphabet had grown uneasy with Boston Dynamics' commercialization timeline and that the company was seeking buyers for the unit.[1] Internal communications from that period, later surfaced in press coverage, revealed friction between Boston Dynamics and other Google robotics teams about strategic direction.
During the Alphabet era, Boston Dynamics continued its research and development work. The company refined Atlas, developed new prototypes, and built the SpotMini, a smaller and quieter quadruped designed with commercial applications in mind. SpotMini was unveiled in June 2016 and would later be redesigned and rebranded as Spot for its 2019 commercial launch.[1]
On June 8, 2017, Alphabet announced the sale of Boston Dynamics, along with the Tokyo-based bipedal robotics firm Schaft, to SoftBank Group, the Japanese telecommunications and investment conglomerate.[9][10] The financial terms were not officially disclosed, though press reports placed the price in the range of approximately $100 million to $165 million.[10] SoftBank later invested an additional $37 million in Boston Dynamics in 2019.[11]
Under SoftBank's ownership, Boston Dynamics accelerated its push toward commercialization. The company launched Spot as its first commercial product in 2019, began developing warehouse automation solutions through the Pick line and the Stretch project, and grew its workforce significantly. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son had expressed a long-standing interest in robotics, having previously acquired the French humanoid maker Aldebaran Robotics (creators of NAO and Pepper) and having framed robots as central to his investment thesis around artificial intelligence.[9]
The SoftBank years marked a turning point for Boston Dynamics, shifting the company's identity from a pure research lab to a commercial robotics enterprise. The decision to launch Spot as a paid commercial product, with a published price and a self-service ordering process, represented a fundamental departure from the bespoke government-contract model that had previously defined the company's business.
In December 2020, Hyundai Motor Group agreed to acquire an 80% controlling stake in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for approximately $880 million, with the total deal valuing the company at $1.1 billion.[7][8] SoftBank retained a 20% stake through a subsidiary.[6] The acquisition was formally completed on June 21, 2021, after regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.[6]
Under Hyundai's ownership, Boston Dynamics deepened its focus on manufacturing applications, particularly for automotive production. The partnership leverages Hyundai's manufacturing scale and Boston Dynamics' robotics expertise. In April 2025, the two companies announced an expanded collaboration, with Hyundai committing to purchase tens of thousands of robots in the coming years.[60] Hyundai is building production capacity that could support up to 30,000 robot units per year by 2028, including a dedicated robotics factory in South Korea, while Hyundai Mobis (the group's components arm) was named the supplier for Atlas's electric actuators.[17][60]
In August 2025, Hyundai Mobis announced an investment of $106 million (approximately 146.5 billion won) in Boston Dynamics.[64] Around the same time, Boston Dynamics began a rights offering of approximately $848.8 million (1.2 trillion won), described in press reports as a step toward a possible NASDAQ listing in the 2027 to 2028 window.[64]
| Period | Owner | Acquisition price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1992 to 2013 | Independent (founder-owned) | N/A | Funded primarily by DARPA, U.S. Army, and consulting contracts |
| Dec 2013 to Jun 2017 | Google X / Alphabet | Undisclosed | Part of Andy Rubin's robotics consolidation |
| Jun 2017 to Jun 2021 | SoftBank Group | Reported ~$100M to $165M; additional $37M investment in 2019 | Spot commercial launch (2019); Stretch development begins |
| Jun 2021 to present | Hyundai Motor Group (80%); SoftBank affiliate (20%) | $880M for controlling stake; total valuation $1.1B | Electric Atlas, Hyundai Mobis actuator partnership, RAI Institute spinoff |
Marc Raibert served as CEO of Boston Dynamics from its founding until 2019, when he transitioned to the role of Chairman.[4] Robert Playter, who had been with the company since 1994 and had previously served as vice president of engineering and chief operating officer, succeeded Raibert as CEO.[1][51] A former NCAA Division I gymnast at Ohio State who completed his PhD with Raibert at MIT, Playter brought both engineering depth and management experience to the role. Under his leadership the company shipped Spot to commercial customers, brought Stretch to market, partnered with Hyundai and Google DeepMind, and unveiled the production version of electric Atlas at CES 2026.[15]
Playter announced his retirement in February 2026, with his final day set for February 27, 2026, after thirty years at the company.[51][52] Amanda McMaster, the company's Chief Financial Officer, was named interim CEO while Boston Dynamics searches for a permanent replacement.[51] Raibert continues as Chairman and also serves as Executive Director of the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute), a Hyundai-funded research lab that works closely with Boston Dynamics on advancing reinforcement learning and other AI techniques for robotics.[45][46]
Other key technical leaders over the years have included Aaron Saunders (chief technology officer for hardware), Scott Kuindersma (who led much of the Atlas behavior software effort), and Marco Hutter, whose academic work on reinforcement learning for legged robots influenced the company's later RL pipelines. The leadership team has historically been drawn heavily from the original MIT Leg Lab cohort and from successive generations of Boston Dynamics interns and engineers.
BigDog was the robot that put Boston Dynamics on the map. Developed in 2005 in collaboration with the Harvard University Concord Field Station and funded by DARPA, BigDog was a dynamically stable quadruped robot designed to serve as a robotic pack mule for soldiers in rough terrain.[28]
BigDog stood 2.5 feet (0.76 m) tall, measured 3 feet (0.91 m) long, and weighed 240 pounds (110 kg).[28] It was designed to carry loads of up to 340 pounds (150 kg) at speeds of up to 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h) over rough terrain at inclines of up to 35 degrees.[28] The robot was powered by a small two-stroke, single-cylinder, 15-brake-horsepower engine that drove a hydraulic pump, which in turn actuated its four hydraulic legs.[28]
A 2008 video showing BigDog walking on ice, recovering from a kick, and traversing snow and rubble became one of the first robotics videos to gain mainstream internet attention. While BigDog demonstrated impressive terrain-handling capabilities, the project was ultimately shelved because the robot's gasoline engine was too loud for combat use.[28] Nevertheless, BigDog proved that dynamically stable legged robots could navigate real-world terrain, and it laid the groundwork for all of Boston Dynamics' subsequent quadruped designs.
LittleDog was a small quadruped platform Boston Dynamics produced under DARPA's Learning Locomotion program. The robot was supplied to research teams at universities including MIT, Stanford, USC, Carnegie Mellon, and IHMC for use as a common testbed for locomotion algorithms. LittleDog was electrically actuated, weighed approximately 7 kilograms, and could be programmed to walk over irregular terrain. The platform was retired around 2012 once the underlying program ended.
Developed under DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program, Cheetah was built for speed. In March 2012, the robot set a new land speed record for legged robots by galloping at 18 mph on a treadmill, breaking the previous record of 13.1 mph that had stood since 1989.[34] In September 2012, Cheetah shattered its own record, reaching 28.3 mph over a 20-meter split, faster than the top speed of Usain Bolt (27.8 mph).[34] The robot's movements were bio-inspired, patterned after fast-moving animals, and it flexed its back with each stride in the same manner as real quadrupeds.[34] Cheetah was tethered to a treadmill and external power source.[34]
WildCat, unveiled in October 2013, was an untethered version of the Cheetah concept, designed to run at high speeds on open terrain without being connected to a treadmill or external power source. WildCat carried an onboard combustion engine and could run at up to 20 mph while maintaining balance and maneuverability, making it the fastest free-running quadruped robot at the time.
PETMAN was a bipedal humanoid robot developed under a U.S. Army contract to test chemical-protective clothing for soldiers.[1] It was the first anthropomorphic robot to walk dynamically like a human and to run on a treadmill.[1] PETMAN could simulate body heat, perspiration, and breathing in order to provide realistic test conditions for protective garments. The walking and balancing technology developed for PETMAN flowed directly into the early hydraulic Atlas program.[30] PETMAN demonstration videos released in 2011 and 2013 anticipated many of the gait and balance behaviors later seen in Atlas.
The Legged Squad Support System (LS3), also known as AlphaDog, was a militarized successor to BigDog.[29] DARPA awarded the initial LS3 contract to Boston Dynamics on December 3, 2009.[29] The LS3 was designed to carry 400 pounds (180 kg) of squad equipment, follow soldiers using visual and voice commands, and navigate terrain using GPS, LIDAR, and infrared sensors.[29] It was required to operate at noise levels below 70 decibels, significantly quieter than BigDog.[29]
The LS3 completed its first outdoor exercise in February 2012 and underwent field testing with the U.S. Marine Corps, including a multi-week exercise during the 2014 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) deployment in Hawaii.[29] However, the program was put into storage in late 2015, having cost approximately $42 million in total development.[29] The Marine Corps cited noise levels and reliability concerns as the primary reasons for retiring the platform.[29]
Handle was a research robot that combined legs and wheels for efficient locomotion. Standing 6.5 feet tall, it could travel at up to 9 mph and jump 4 feet vertically. Handle was designed for logistics applications and could carry heavy loads while balancing on two wheels. A second version of Handle, unveiled in 2019, was specifically designed for warehouse box-handling tasks, with a counterbalancing tail and a single arm equipped with a vacuum gripper. Handle's design directly influenced the later development of Stretch, which inherited the wheeled mobile base concept while replacing the bipedal upper body with a more conventional arm-and-base configuration.
Atlas is Boston Dynamics' flagship humanoid robot and one of the most advanced bipedal robots ever built. Its development has gone through several distinct phases.
The original Atlas was unveiled in July 2013, building on the PETMAN platform.[30][31] It was developed for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a competition designed to advance disaster-response robotics following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.[31][32] In August 2012, DARPA had announced that it would pay approximately $10.9 million to Boston Dynamics to build seven Atlas platforms based on the PETMAN project.[30] The seven Atlas robots were distributed to qualifying teams from an early simulation-based round of the DRC, where teams developed software that controlled the physical robots in the live trials.[32]
The hydraulic Atlas stood approximately 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall, weighed about 75 to 86 kg (165 to 190 lbs) depending on revision, and featured 28 hydraulic joints powered by an onboard battery and hydraulic pump.[30] It was equipped with RGB cameras, depth sensors, and LIDAR for perception.[30] In June 2015, Atlas-based teams competed in the DRC Finals at Pomona, California.[32] The IHMC Robotics team using a Boston Dynamics Atlas placed second overall, completing tasks including driving a utility vehicle, walking over rubble, opening doors, climbing ladders, breaking through concrete walls, and connecting fire hoses.[32]
Over the following decade, Boston Dynamics used the hydraulic Atlas as a research platform for pushing the boundaries of dynamic bipedal locomotion. The robot became famous for a series of viral demonstrations:
On April 16, 2024, Boston Dynamics officially retired the hydraulic Atlas, publishing a farewell video.[12][13] The company stated: "For almost a decade, Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists, and leapt over technical barriers in the field."[12]
The very next day, April 17, 2024, Boston Dynamics revealed the all-electric Atlas, a comprehensive redesign of the humanoid platform built from the ground up for commercial deployment.[12][13] The electric Atlas replaces all hydraulic actuators with custom high-power electric actuators utilizing planetary roller screws and high-density neodymium magnets.[14] The transition removed the noise, leaks, and maintenance burden of hydraulics while enabling more compact joint packaging.[14]
The production version of electric Atlas, unveiled at CES 2026, weighs approximately 89 kg (198 lbs), stands about 1.88 m (6.2 ft) tall, has a reach of 2.3 m (7.5 ft) at full extension, and offers 56 degrees of freedom with mostly fully rotational joints at the hips, waist, and neck that allow 360-degree rotation.[15][16] These joint configurations enable movements that exceed the human range of motion. The robot can sprint at speeds up to 2.5 m/s, sustain a payload of approximately 30 kg (66 lbs), burst-lift up to 50 kg (110 lbs), and operate for roughly 4 hours on a charge before swapping its own battery in less than three minutes.[15][16] Boston Dynamics has reported electrical-to-mechanical efficiency of approximately 85 to 90% in the actuators.[15]
Hyundai Mobis is the named supplier for the actuators, which combine a motor, precision-control reducer, and controller in a single unit; the partnership is intended to leverage automotive-grade supply chains for high-volume robot production.[17] The grippers feature human-scale hands with tactile sensing, designed for diverse manipulation tasks in industrial settings.[15]
At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics unveiled the production-ready version of Atlas, announcing that all 2026 units were already committed for deployment.[15][16] Fleets are scheduled to ship to Hyundai's Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) and to Google DeepMind for joint research.[15][43] The initial deployment at Hyundai's Metaplant America facility near Savannah, Georgia, will focus on relatively simple tasks such as transporting automotive parts to specific locations on the production line, with full-scale deployment expected by 2028 and complex assembly work targeted for 2030.[62] Atlas was named "Best Robot" in CNET Group's Best of CES 2026 awards.[63]
| Specification | Hydraulic Atlas (2013 to 2024) | Electric Atlas (2024 to present) |
|---|---|---|
| Height | ~1.5 m (5 ft) | ~1.88 m (6.2 ft) |
| Weight | 75 to 86 kg (165 to 190 lbs) | ~89 kg (198 lbs) |
| Actuation | 28 hydraulic joints | Electric actuators (Hyundai Mobis) |
| Degrees of freedom | 28 | 56 (mostly fully rotational) |
| Reach | ~1.5 m | ~2.3 m (7.5 ft) |
| Payload (sustained) | Limited | ~30 kg (66 lbs) |
| Burst lift | Limited | ~50 kg (110 lbs) |
| Top speed | ~1.5 m/s | ~2.5 m/s |
| Battery life | Tethered or short autonomous | ~4 hr, self-swappable |
| Status | Retired April 16, 2024 | Production (2026) |
Spot is Boston Dynamics' commercially available quadruped robot and the company's most successful product to date. Originally introduced as SpotMini in 2016 during the Alphabet era, the robot was redesigned and rebranded as Spot for commercial launch.[1] Spot debuted in an early access program in September 2019 with a small group of partner customers.[20] On June 16, 2020, Spot became available for general purchase in the United States at a base price of $74,500 for the Explorer Kit, which includes the robot, two batteries, a charger, a tablet controller, a robot case, and Python client packages for the Spot SDK.[18][19]
Spot weighs about 32.7 kg, can carry a payload of up to 14 kg, and features an agile, four-legged design that allows it to navigate stairs, rough terrain, and confined spaces that wheeled robots cannot access.[20] The robot operates for approximately 90 minutes on a single battery charge, has a maximum speed of 1.6 m/s in its standard configuration, and can be equipped with a range of sensors and accessories.[20]
In February 2021, Boston Dynamics expanded the Spot product line with three additions:[21]
Add-ons available for Spot include LIDAR sensors for 360-degree 3D mapping (approximately $18,450 additional) and a specialized thermal and visual inspection package (approximately $29,750 additional). With add-ons, a fully equipped Spot can cost well over $100,000.[19] As of 2025, Boston Dynamics had over 1,500 Spot robots in customer hands across more than 35 countries.
Spot has found adoption across a wide range of industries:
Stretch is Boston Dynamics' first robot designed specifically for warehouse logistics. Unveiled in March 2021 and made available for commercial purchase on March 28, 2022, Stretch is built to handle one of the most physically demanding tasks in warehouses: unloading boxes from trucks and shipping containers.[22][23] The retail price has been reported in the range of $300,000 to $500,000 per unit, depending on configuration.
The robot features a compact, omnidirectional mobile base roughly the size of a pallet, a custom-designed lightweight arm with a vacuum gripper, and an advanced computer vision system based on the Pick technology that detects and identifies boxes in real time.[22] Key specifications include:
Stretch's vision system identifies a wide range of package types without extensive per-customer training, and the robot autonomously decides how many and which boxes to pick based on size, weight, and arrangement.[22] Initial demand outstripped supply: Boston Dynamics reported in 2022 that all units scheduled for that year had sold out before commercial release.[23] Reservations opened for 2023 and 2024 deliveries, with a multi-year backlog persisting into 2025.
Key customers for Stretch include:
Pick is Boston Dynamics' machine learning vision solution for warehouse depalletizing, originally developed by Kinema Systems and acquired by Boston Dynamics in April 2019.[35][36] Unlike Stretch, which is a mobile robot, Pick is a stationary system that uses 2D and 3D computer vision to identify and locate boxes in real-world warehouse environments.[36] It can identify a box in less than a second and automatically handles the removal of cardboard layer sheets between stacks. Pick is designed to work alongside other robots, conveyor systems, and robotic arms in automated fulfillment operations, and the same vision stack underpins Stretch's box-detection capabilities.
The Kinema acquisition was significant beyond the Pick product itself. It established Boston Dynamics' first office in Silicon Valley and brought a team with deep deep-learning vision expertise into a company that had historically been dominated by control engineering and mechanical design.[35][36] The acquisition also marked Boston Dynamics' first move into commercial product sales.
| Robot | Year | Type | Key specifications | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RHex | 2002 | Hexapod | 30 lbs, six-legged rough-terrain robot | Retired |
| BigDog | 2005 | Quadruped | 240 lbs, carries 340 lbs, 4 mph, hydraulic | Retired |
| RiSE | 2005 | Hexapod climber | Six-legged, climbs vertical surfaces | Retired |
| LittleDog | 2009 | Quadruped | Small research platform for external software testing | Retired |
| PETMAN | 2009 | Bipedal humanoid | First dynamic anthropomorphic robot, 7 km/h walk | Retired |
| LS3 / AlphaDog | 2012 | Quadruped | Carries 400 lbs, GPS/LIDAR nav, <70 dB noise | Retired (2015) |
| Cheetah | 2012 | Quadruped | 28.3 mph top speed, tethered treadmill | Retired |
| SandFlea | 2012 | Wheeled/jumping | 11 lbs, jumps 30 feet vertically | Retired |
| WildCat | 2013 | Quadruped | 20 mph untethered, autonomous outdoor running | Retired |
| Atlas (Hydraulic) | 2013 | Bipedal humanoid | 1.5 m tall, 75 to 86 kg, 28 hydraulic joints | Retired (April 2024) |
| Spot | 2016 (commercial 2019 to 2020) | Quadruped | 32.7 kg, 14 kg payload, 90 min battery, $74,500 | Active (commercial) |
| Handle | 2017 | Bipedal/wheeled | 6.5 ft tall, 9 mph, 4-ft vertical jump | Retired |
| Pick | 2019 | Vision system | ML-based 2D/3D box identification, <1 sec detection | Active (commercial) |
| Stretch | 2021 (commercial 2022) | Mobile manipulator | 50 lb box capacity, 800 cases/hr, 16-hr battery | Active (commercial) |
| Atlas (Electric) | 2024 | Bipedal humanoid | 89 kg, 1.88 m tall, 56 DoF, electric actuators | Active (production 2026) |
While Boston Dynamics is best known for its hardware, software has played an increasingly central role in its commercial offering. The company maintains a public Spot SDK on GitHub, supports a fleet management platform, and ships custom tools for behavior authoring and simulation.
The Spot SDK is the public programming interface for the Spot robot, distributed as Python libraries with documentation and examples on GitHub. Developers use the SDK to teleoperate the robot, build autonomous missions, attach payloads, and process sensor data. The SDK exposes higher-level APIs for navigation, perception, and arm manipulation, as well as low-level joint-control APIs that became important for reinforcement-learning research. Boston Dynamics publishes regular release notes (Spot 5.x as of 2025) tracking new features, bug fixes, and supported payloads.
Orbit is Boston Dynamics' web-based fleet management platform. Originally launched as Scout in 2020 and rebranded as Orbit in 2023, the platform provides centralized dashboards that aggregate data from all sites for an enterprise customer, giving a unified view of robot activity, site performance, and fleet health for Spot, Stretch, and eventually Atlas.[49]
Orbit supports task scheduling and orchestration, on-site or cloud deployment, and integrates with existing Wi-Fi, LTE, or cellular connections.[49] The Orbit API allows enterprise customers to pull mission data and telemetry into their own analytics pipelines and historian databases.[49]
Choreographer is a Windows and Linux desktop application used to author choreography sequences for Spot, synchronize them with music, and execute them on the robot.[50] The application underpins many of the dance and entertainment demonstrations the company has released, and is licensed separately to commercial customers. The Choreography SDK provides programmatic access to the same primitives, allowing custom moves to be defined in code.[50]
In 2024, Boston Dynamics released the Spot Reinforcement Learning Researcher Kit, a software-and-hardware bundle developed with NVIDIA and the AI Institute.[48][69] The kit includes a license for the Spot joint-level control API, an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin payload for deploying RL policies on the robot, and a GPU-accelerated Spot simulation environment based on NVIDIA Isaac Lab.[48][69] Researchers using the kit have demonstrated record running speeds of 11.5 mph (5.2 m/s) for Spot, more than three times its standard gait speed, and have published papers on sim-to-real transfer for legged locomotion.[47]
Boston Dynamics has increasingly integrated artificial intelligence into its robots, with reinforcement learning (RL) playing a growing role. Historically, the company's locomotion and manipulation behaviors were authored using model-predictive control and trajectory optimization, with hand-tuned controllers for each task. Beginning in the early 2020s, RL-based policies trained in simulation began to replace or supplement these hand-engineered controllers, especially on Spot and the electric Atlas.
In February 2025, the company announced a partnership with the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute), led by Marc Raibert, to establish a shared reinforcement learning training pipeline for the electric Atlas robot.[45] The collaboration focuses on sim-to-real transfer, where policies trained in simulation are deployed on physical hardware to generate agile, robust locomotion and manipulation behaviors.[45] The teams are working on whole-body loco-manipulation, where Atlas manipulates objects while moving, and on developing policies that improve robustness when the robot interacts with fixtures and objects during locomotion.
A 2025 paper from the RAI Institute, "High-Performance Reinforcement Learning on Spot: Optimizing Simulation Parameters with Distributional Measures," described methods for closing the sim-to-real gap by tuning simulation distributions to match observed real-world dynamics, an approach now used in both Spot and Atlas pipelines.
Computer vision is at the core of how Boston Dynamics robots perceive and interact with their environments. Spot uses cameras and LIDAR for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, and inspection tasks. Its machine learning algorithms detect anomalies during thermal scans and gauge readings. Stretch's vision system, derived from the Kinema acquisition, identifies boxes of many shapes, sizes, and visual appearances without requiring custom training for each warehouse customer.[36]
In 2025, Boston Dynamics expanded Spot's AI capabilities to go beyond individual equipment inspections to full facility-level analysis, using AI to provide insights about the overall health of operations and sites. Customers can compare scans across time, automatically flag drift in gauge readings, and surface anomalies that would be hard to detect through individual inspections.
In October 2023, Boston Dynamics published a video and engineering blog post titled "Robots that can chat," demonstrating Spot acting as a tour guide of the company's Waltham campus using OpenAI's ChatGPT (initially GPT-3.5, later GPT-4) and a vision-question-answer model.[41][42] The robot could walk to objects, describe them using a vision model, elaborate using the LLM, answer audience questions, and even decide on its own next actions, including walking to the IT help desk when asked about Marc Raibert and not knowing the answer.[41] Boston Dynamics engineers prompted the LLM by structuring API outputs as Python code, providing English documentation in the form of comments, and evaluating the LLM's output as code.[41]
The demo was widely covered as one of the first credible examples of an LLM directing a real robot's behavior in an open-ended environment.[42] The team noted that hallucination remained a problem (the LLM repeatedly described Stretch as "a robot for yoga," for example), and that more grounded interfaces would be needed for production deployment.[41]
At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics announced a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics foundation models into the Atlas platform.[43][44] The partnership aims to broaden the range of tasks Atlas can perform by improving its ability to interpret instructions, adjust to different environments, and operate safely alongside humans.[43] The Gemini Robotics models combine advanced perception, reasoning, and interaction capabilities, which will complement Atlas's physical dexterity.[43] Joint research is being conducted at both companies' facilities, and a fleet of Atlas units is shipping to Google DeepMind for the duration of the collaboration.[43][44]
The partnership was widely reported as a return to the Google orbit for Boston Dynamics, given the company's earlier ownership by Alphabet.[44] Industry observers contrasted the new collaboration with the Alphabet era, noting that it is a research and software partnership rather than an acquisition, and that Boston Dynamics remains a Hyundai-controlled subsidiary.[44]
On October 16, 2024, Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced a partnership to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoid robots by combining TRI's Large Behavior Models (LBMs) research with the all-electric Atlas hardware.[66][67] TRI had pioneered the LBM approach, training a single diffusion-policy model on hundreds of human-demonstrated manipulation tasks and showing that the model could be conditioned on language prompts to perform new behaviors.[67] Under the agreement, the two companies share research personnel, software, and data, with Atlas robots running TRI-trained behavior models at the Boston Dynamics campus and at TRI's facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[66][67] Russ Tedrake, who leads TRI's robotics research and is also a professor at MIT, took on an additional senior role at Boston Dynamics overseeing the joint behavior-model effort.[66]
The TRI collaboration represented one of the first public examples of a humanoid hardware manufacturer integrating an externally developed foundation-model approach into its production-bound platform. The partnership runs alongside, rather than instead of, the company's internal reinforcement-learning pipeline with the RAI Institute and the Gemini Robotics collaboration with Google DeepMind, with the three programs targeting complementary capability domains.
Boston Dynamics has also been an early industrial partner for NVIDIA's humanoid robotics platform. At GTC 2024, Atlas was among the humanoid robots referenced in the announcement of Project GR00T (now NVIDIA Isaac GR00T), NVIDIA's foundation-model program for humanoids.[68] Boston Dynamics uses NVIDIA's Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for large-scale GPU-accelerated simulation of Spot and Atlas, and the Reinforcement Learning Researcher Kit ships with a Jetson AGX Orin payload to deploy trained policies on-robot.[48][69] At GTC 2025, Robert Playter joined NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on stage to discuss the role of simulation in scaling humanoid behaviors.
Boston Dynamics operated for most of its history as a research-focused organization funded primarily through government contracts. The shift toward commercialization began with the 2019 acquisition of Kinema Systems and accelerated under SoftBank, with Spot's launch in 2019 to 2020.[35] The Hyundai era has seen further acceleration, with Stretch's commercial launch in 2022, the electric Atlas reveal in 2024, and the production rollout in 2026.
Spot was the company's first commercial product. Stretch followed as the second, and the production Atlas brings the company into the humanoid commercial market. Together with Pick, these products form Boston Dynamics' current commercial portfolio. Over 1,500 Spot robots and a smaller (but growing) fleet of Stretch robots have been deployed across more than 35 countries.
Boston Dynamics remains a private company, and its detailed financials are not separately reported in Hyundai Motor Group's filings. Third-party estimates have placed annual revenue in the range of $100 million to $150 million as of the mid-2020s, though exact figures are not publicly disclosed. Press reports indicate that the Atlas program operates at a loss, with Hyundai absorbing capital costs as part of the broader strategic investment.
In August 2025, Boston Dynamics initiated a rights offering of approximately $848.8 million (1.2 trillion won), with Hyundai Mobis investing $106 million.[64] Press analysis suggested the rights offering positioned Boston Dynamics for a potential NASDAQ listing in 2027 to 2028, although no formal IPO timeline has been confirmed.[64]
The Hyundai partnership provides both a major customer and a manufacturing partner. Hyundai has committed to purchasing tens of thousands of robots, and the two companies are building production capacity to support large-scale manufacturing.[60][62] The plan to produce 30,000 robot units per year by 2028 would represent a dramatic scale-up from the company's current production volumes.[60]
| Sector | Customer | Robot | Application |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oil and gas | BP | Spot | Offshore inspection, leak detection (Mad Dog platform)[38] |
| Oil and gas | Aker BP | Spot | Offshore inspection (Skarv FPSO, Norwegian Sea)[37] |
| Energy | Ontario Power Generation | Spot | Nuclear plant gauge reading, thermal inspection |
| Energy | J-POWER | Spot | Onikobe Geothermal Power Plant patrols |
| Utilities | Consumers Energy | Spot | Substation thermal scanning |
| Utilities | National Grid | Spot | Asset management |
| Manufacturing | BMW Group (UK) | Spot | Plant monitoring at Hams Hall[40] |
| Manufacturing | Anheuser-Busch InBev | Spot | Brewery inspection (Leuven) |
| Construction | Pomerleau | Spot | Progress documentation |
| Public safety | NYPD, Boston PD, MA State Police | Spot | Bomb squad, hostage rescue support |
| Nuclear | UK Atomic Energy Authority / U. of Bristol | Spot | Chernobyl New Safe Confinement radiation mapping[39] |
| Logistics | DHL Supply Chain | Stretch | Truck unloading ($15M multi-year agreement)[24] |
| Logistics | Maersk (Performance Team) | Stretch | U.S. distribution center unloading |
| Retail | Gap Inc. | Stretch | Truck unloading at Tennessee, Ohio, Texas, California sites[27] |
| Retail | H&M | Stretch | Truck unloading |
| Logistics | Otto Group / Arvato | Stretch | German distribution center automation |
| Manufacturing | Hyundai Motor Group (Metaplant Georgia) | Atlas (electric) | Parts sequencing, automotive assembly (2026 to 2030)[62] |
| AI research | Google DeepMind | Atlas (electric) | Gemini Robotics foundation model research[43] |
The Robotics and AI Institute, originally launched as the Boston Dynamics AI Institute in August 2022 by Hyundai Motor Group with an initial commitment of more than $400 million, is an independent research organization that works closely with Boston Dynamics on advanced robotics.[46] It was rebranded as the AI Institute and later as the RAI Institute. Marc Raibert serves as Executive Director.[45][46]
RAI Institute was set up to take on long-horizon research that did not fit cleanly into Boston Dynamics' product roadmap, particularly machine learning techniques for robotics that require significant simulation infrastructure and academic-style publication cycles.[46] Research areas include reinforcement learning for legged and humanoid robots, foundation models for robotics, dexterous manipulation, and locomotion at the limits of physical capability.
The institute is structurally a Hyundai Motor Group organization rather than a Boston Dynamics subsidiary, although the two organizations share a common ownership and collaborate extensively.[46] In February 2025, Boston Dynamics and the RAI Institute formally announced a joint reinforcement learning pipeline for the electric Atlas, sharing simulation infrastructure and policy training methods.[45]
Boston Dynamics operates in an increasingly competitive robotics market, with competition coming from multiple directions.
The humanoid robot space has grown rapidly since 2023, with numerous companies developing bipedal robots for manufacturing, logistics, and general-purpose tasks:
In the quadruped market, Spot faces growing competition:
Stretch competes in the broader warehouse automation market against companies like Amazon Robotics, Locus Robotics, Symbotic, and Pickle Robot Company. Pickle Robot in particular targets the same truck-unloading niche with a competing mobile manipulator.
A 2025 market report placed Unitree, UBTECH, and Boston Dynamics as leaders in the humanoid robotics market, commanding a combined 58.2% share, while Tesla, Agility Robotics, 1X Technologies, Figure AI, and NEURA Robotics were identified as challengers scaling through innovation and partnerships.[65]
In late 2020, the New York Police Department leased a Spot robot, branded "Digidog," through a $94,000 contract with Boston Dynamics.[54] Digidog made several deployments in early 2021, including a public housing call in the Bronx and a hostage rescue operation.[53] After several high-profile deployments drew criticism from elected officials and civil-liberties groups, including comparisons to the dystopian "Black Mirror" episode "Metalhead," the contract was terminated in April 2021.[53][54] New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's office described the robot as "creepy, alienating, and the wrong message to New Yorkers."[53]
In April 2023, the NYPD reintroduced Digidog under a new mayoral administration with a published use policy that limited deployment to specific situations such as bomb threats and hostage rescues.[55] Boston Dynamics issued a statement in support of the redeployment, citing the transparency of the new use policy.[55] The episode highlighted both the public sensitivity around robotics in policing and the broader debate over the appropriate use of advanced mobile robots in law enforcement.
The possibility of weaponized quadruped robots became a significant public concern in 2021 to 2022 as third parties began mounting firearms on legged robots from various manufacturers. In response, on October 6, 2022, Boston Dynamics joined Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, and Unitree in publishing an open letter titled "General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized," pledging that the signatories would not weaponize their advanced-mobility general-purpose robots or the software they develop, and would not support others to do so.[56][57]
The letter clarified that the signatories were not opposing the use of existing technologies by nations and government agencies for self-defense and law enforcement, but were taking a stance against the addition of weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations.[57] The companies also pledged to review customer applications, where possible, to avoid potential weaponization, and to explore technological features that could mitigate or reduce risks.[57]
Boston Dynamics' terms of service for Spot explicitly prohibit weaponization, and the company has terminated agreements with customers who attempted to mount firearms on the robot.[56]
The rapid succession of owners over the company's history (Google to SoftBank to Hyundai) prompted recurring concern from employees and observers about strategic stability. Each transition involved a re-evaluation of priorities, and in some cases led to layoffs or product cancellations. The Hyundai era has been described as the most aligned with Boston Dynamics' historical strengths, given Hyundai's interest in physical robots for manufacturing rather than software-only or consumer-electronics applications.
Boston Dynamics has had an outsized cultural impact relative to its size. The company's YouTube channel has accumulated billions of views, with individual videos regularly drawing tens of millions of views in their first weeks. Notable viral videos include:
The videos have also sparked public debate about the implications of advanced robotics, with some viewers expressing awe at the engineering achievements and others voicing concerns about potential military or surveillance applications. The company's polished video production and willingness to release blooper-style content (a long-running tradition) have set a tone that other robotics companies have widely imitated.
Boston Dynamics is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, in a campus expanded multiple times since 2010 to support its growing engineering staff.[2] The Waltham campus houses engineering, software development, and a robot factory floor where current Spot, Stretch, and Atlas robots are assembled. The company maintains a Silicon Valley office originally inherited from the 2019 Kinema Systems acquisition, focused on perception and machine learning, as well as service and support facilities internationally, including a certified repair center in South Korea.[35]
At CES 2026 the company stated that initial production of Atlas would take place in Boston, with Hyundai planning a dedicated robotics manufacturing facility capable of producing up to 30,000 robots per year by 2028.[15][60]