This week, Boston Dynamics retired its famous hydraulically powered Atlas robot. Then today, it unveiled its new Atlas robot, powered by electricity.
The change may seem small, but Brian Heater of TechCrunch told the TechCrunch Minute that the now-obsolete hydraulic system was obsolete. It’s not hard to see why Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics wanted to go electric. Its new Atlas robot is slimmer and appears to have an improved range of motion. Size and the ability to contort and maneuver are not cosmetic features for a humanoid robot: they can unlock new use cases and possible work environments.
The new Atlas isn’t incredibly well defined today, which isn’t a big surprise considering it’s still a work in progress. However, we do know that it will first head to Hyundai factories before hitting the market more generally.
Luckily for those of us who want a home robot to take care of household chores and hold our hands while we cry, other startups are working on the humanoid robot project. Figure, Agility, Tesla, there are too many companies vying for the same price to mention in this short article. What excites me incredibly: more people working on the problem means faster progress and, hopefully, faster completion of a general-purpose humanoid robot capable of learning.
On this last point, it is worth keeping in mind that AI is set to play an important role in how robots move from performing excellent, defined, repetitive tasks to being able to learn and do well more without direct programming. Although it will take time for LLMs to ingest language, write code, etc., to connect to the robots being developed today, you can glimpse the future if you look far enough. All I can say is: faster, please!
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