Boston Dynamics provides artificial intelligence to the brain of its Atlas robot.

Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) recently announced their collaboration for the development of general-purpose humanoid robots. Boston Dynamics will provide its new electric robot Atlas, while TRI will use its advanced Large Behavior Models (LBM) technology. Founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston Dynamics has been at the forefront of robotic development for over three decades. The company gained notoriety in 2009 with its quadrupedal systems BigDog and LittleDog, and presented the first version of its bipedal platform Atlas in 2013.

Over the past decade, Atlas's capabilities have continuously evolved, allowing the robot to perform increasingly complex acrobatics and dexterous tasks, ranging from dancing and doing flips to conquering parkour courses and navigating simulated construction sites. In April 2024, the company retired its hydraulic Atlas platform in favor of a new generation powered by electric servo motors. Boston Dynamics describes the electric Atlas as “one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever built,” capable of moving in ways that surpass human capabilities.

On its part, TRI is a leader in the development of Large Behavior Models. These models in robotics are conceptually analogous to Large Language Models (LLM) used in chatbots. Just as LLMs are trained on large multimodal datasets to interact coherently with humans, LBMs are trained on vast corpuses of human behaviors, enabling robots to act and move similarly to people. They also allow robots to learn new behaviors and generalize across different tasks. According to the announcement, “TRI’s work on LBM aims to achieve vision-and-language conditioned base models for skilled manipulation.”

Gill Pratt, Chief Scientist at Toyota and CEO of TRI, stated that “recent advances in AI and machine learning offer great potential to enhance physical intelligence.” He added that “the opportunity to implement TRI's cutting-edge AI technology into Boston Dynamics' hardware represents a radical shift for our organizations as we work to amplify human capability and improve quality of life.”

This announcement comes in a context where many companies are looking to integrate robots into the future workforce. For example, Agility Robotics' Digit models and Figure's 01 and 02 are already being tested in industrial environments, such as BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and a Spanx production facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Tesla's Optimus robot is also in the running, although its latest versions still require remote operation to perform more complex tasks.