New robot walks the talk as automation race heats up
Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics made its humanoid robot Atlas public display for the first time at the CES technology show, stepping up competition from Tesla and other rivals to produce robots that look like humans and do things humans do.
“For the first time in my life, please invite Atlas on stage,” Boston Dynamics’ Zachary Jackowski said as a life-size robot with two arms and two legs carried him off stage in a Las Vegas hotel ballroom on Monday.
He then moved fluidly around the stage for several minutes, sometimes waving to the crowd and turning his head like an owl. Jackowski, the company’s general manager of humanoid robots, said an engineer remotely controlled the nearby robot for demonstration purposes, but in real life Atlas would move on its own.
A product version of the robot that will help assemble cars is already in production and will be deployed at Hyundai’s electric vehicle manufacturing facility near Savannah, Georgia, by 2028, the company said.
The South Korean automaker owns a majority stake in Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, which has been developing robots for decades and is best known for its first commercial product, a dog-like robot called Spot.
A group of four-legged Spot robots opened Hyundai’s event on Monday by dancing in sync to a K-pop song.
Hyundai also announced a new partnership with Google’s DeepMind, which will supply its artificial intelligence technology to Boston Dynamics robots.
This marks a return to a familiar partnership for Google, which bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 and sold it to Japanese tech giant SoftBank a few years later. Hyundai acquired it from SoftBank in 2021.
At the end of the Atlas demonstration, the humanoid prototype waved its hands in a theatrical gesture to introduce a static model of the new product version of Atlas, which looked slightly different.
Excitement from the commercial AI boom and new technical advances have helped pour large amounts of money into robotics development; But many experts think it will take a long time for truly human-like robots that can perform many different tasks to take root in workplaces or homes.
“I think it comes down to what are the use cases and where is the applicability of the technology,” said Alex Panas, a McKinsey consulting partner who helped moderate a CES robotics panel that drew hundreds of people earlier in the day. “In some cases it may seem more human-like. In other cases it may not.”
Either way, Panas said, “Software, chipsets, communications, all the other pieces of technology will come together to create new applications.”
