Robotics company Boston Dynamics has partnered with Google’s AI Research Institute to accelerate the development of the next generation of humanoid robots, Atlas, allowing it to act more human-like around people.
The partnership, announced Monday at a Hyundai press conference at CES 2026, focuses on robotics research using Google DeepMind’s AI-based models. The first test case will be Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot, said Carolina Parada, senior director of robotics at Google DeepMind.
“We are exploring the integration of our cutting-edge AI-based model with Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robot, with the goal of developing the world’s most advanced robot-based model to meet true general-purpose human needs,” Parada said on stage.
The partnership comes less than a year after Google AI Labs announced a new AI model called Gemini Robotics, designed to help robots perceive, reason, use tools, and interact with humans. Gemini Robotics is based on the large-scale multimodal generative AI model Gemini. At the time, Google DeepMind said its robot AI model was trained to generalize its behavior across a variety of robot hardware.
Enter Boston Dynamics and its majority owner, Hyundai Motor Group. Accelerating research will be a central part of this partnership, with real-world extensions.
Boston Dynamics already offers products such as the four-legged Spot, which is in the hands of customers in more than 40 countries. Hyundai says its warehouse robot Stretch has unloaded more than 20 million boxes around the world since its launch in 2023. Boston Dynamics and Hyundai are currently preparing the next generation of robots, starting with the humanoid robot Atlas. The company announced Monday that production has already begun and is heading to the Hyundai plant in Savannah, Georgia.
A prototype of the Atlas took to the stage during a press conference to demonstrate its locomotion capabilities. But, says Alberto Rodríguez, director of Atlas Behavior at Boston Dynamics, “For Atlas to become a product, a humanoid will need more than athletic ability to actually deliver on its promise. Humanoids must be able to interact naturally with people.”
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Rodriguez and his colleagues at Boston Dynamics believe that recent advances in AI provide a clear path to achieving these capabilities. This natural human interaction has real-world safety implications.
The Atlas product, which was also unveiled on stage Monday and will eventually make its way to Hyundai’s factories, features 56 degrees of freedom with a human-scale hand with rotating joints and tactile sensing. And it’s strong. The Atlas robot can lift up to 110 pounds and is designed to perform repetitive motions.
This kind of dexterity and strength is critical for Atlas, and any humanoid robot, to safely interact and work with humans. Some of that is handled on the hardware side. For example, Atlas has a 360-degree camera that lets you see people approaching you. But DeepMind’s research could help robots learn how to behave.
“Instead of having a predefined set of tasks loaded into the robot, we believe that robots should understand the physical world the same way we do,” Parada said. “Robots should be able to learn from their own experiences. They should be able to generalize to new situations and improve over time. So whether it’s assembling new car parts or tying your shoelaces, robots should be able to learn the same way we do from small numbers of examples, and get better at it quickly with a little practice.”
Hyundai introduced Atlas to its factories this year, with plans to eventually use it for tasks such as parts sequencing by 2028, and has also developed protocols to improve safety and efficiency.
Hyundai announced on Monday that it will open a facility this year called the Robot Metaplant Application Center (RMAC), which will teach robots how to map movements such as lifts and turns. Training data from RMAC is combined with real-world data collected through a software platform used at the Georgia factory to continuously improve the robot.
See TechCrunch’s full coverage of the annual CES conference here.
This article has been updated to include more information about Atlas specifications.
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