Boston Dynamics Partners with Former CEO's Institute to Enhance Atlas Humanoid Robot's AI Capabilities

Boston Dynamics Partners with Its Former CEO to Build a Humanoid Robot

The company is looking to supercharge its development of Atlas, an electric humanoid robot. Boston Dynamics, known for its robot dog "Spot" used by law enforcement, utility companies and tech researchers, is partnering with an organization led by its founder and former CEO to create a humanoid robot called Atlas. The Waltham, Mass.-based company is tapping the Robotics & AI Institute, led by Boston Dynamics' founder Marc Raibert, to develop Atlas via reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning that trains machines through trial and error. The collaboration began earlier this month and will see researchers utilize the training method to improve the robot's behavior on tasks such as opening doors and running, Boston Dynamics revealed yesterday (Feb. 5). Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters "Working on Atlas with Boston Dynamics enables us to make advances in reinforcement learning on arguably the most sophisticated humanoid robot available," said Raibert in a statement. "This work will play a crucial role in advancing the capabilities of humanoids not only by advancing its skillset, but also streamline the process to achieve new skills." Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992 after spinning it off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Raibert formerly worked as a professor for nearly a decade. Besides Spot, the company's commercial robot portfolio currently includes Stretch, a box-moving robot used in warehouses. Its first-generation hydraulic humanoid robot, meanwhile, was unveiled by Boston Dynamics back in 2013 and retired last year in favor of a new, electric version that will be designed for real-world applications. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Boston Dynamics (@bostondynamicsofficial) In 2021, Hyundai acquired a majority stake in Boston Dynamics in a deal that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. A year later, the automaker also launched the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI), then known as the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, with $400 million in funding. Raibert, who served as CEO of Boston Dynamics between 1992 to 2019, has headed the Cambridge, Mass.-based organization since its founding. Focused on solving A.I. problems related to robotics, RAI's priorities include cognitive A.I., athletic A.I. and robotics ethics. This isn't the first time its research team has been deployed to help out Boston Dynamics. Last year, it worked with the company develop a reinforcement learning kit for Spot. Now, the research institute will focus on enhancing Atlas' capabilities with a project that will emphasize areas like the manipulation of objects and fixtures and explore full-body contact strategies that require coordination between arms and legs, such as dynamic running. The researchers will update the public on their progress through periodic publications and demonstrations of Atlas. The humanoid robot's development is also being aided by the research unit of Toyota, which partnered up with Boston Dynamics last year to provide expertise in large behavior model learning. "For humanoids to be useful, they must be flexible enough to work in many different kinds of environments and perform tasks in a wide variety of applications," said Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter in a statement, adding that the company's newest collaboration with RAI will "help accelerate core capabilities needed to make robots like Atlas a valuable tool in people's lives."

Boston Dynamics joins forces with its former CEO to speed the learning of its Atlas humanoid robot | TechCrunch

Boston Dynamics Wednesday announced a partnership designed to bring improved reinforcement learning to its electric Atlas humanoid robot. The tie-up is with the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI Institute), earlier known as The Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Both organizations were founded by Marc Raibert, a former MIT professor who served as Boston Dynamics' CEO for 30 years. The Institute, founded in 2022, allows Raibert to continue the research that served as the foundation for Boston Dynamics. Both have ties to Hyundai. The Korean carmaker acquired Boston Dynamics back in 2021; Hyundai also funds the Institute, giving Raibert free rein to explore more experimental and bleeding-edge technologies than is possible in a commercial company. The Institute mirrors Toyota's creation of TRI, for Toyota Research Institute, which announced its own partnership with Boston Dynamics in October, focused on the use of large behavior models. (LBMs). The twin partnerships are designed to improve the way Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas humanoid learns new tasks. The Robotics & AI Institute deal is specifically focused on reinforcement learning, a method that operates through trial and error, similar to the way both humans and animals learn. Reinforcement learning has traditionally been extremely time intensive, though the creation of effective simulation has allowed many processes to be carried out at once in a virtual setting. The Boston Dynamics/RAI Institute union kicked off earlier this month in Massachusetts. It's the latest in a number of collaborations between the pair, including a joint effort to develop a reinforcement learning research kit for the quadrupedal Spot robot by Boston Dynamics (which is its familiar robot "dog"). The new work focuses on both transferring simulation-based learning to real world settings and improving how the company's humanoid Atlas moves through and interacts with physical environments. Pertaining to the latter, Boston Dynamics points to "dynamic running and full-body manipulation of heavy objects." Both are examples of actions that require synchronization of the legs and arms. The humanoid's bipedal form factor presents a number of unique challenges - and opportunities - when compared with Spot. Every activity is also subject to a broad range of forces, including balance, force, resistance, and motion. Bigger picture, Raibert notes in a statement, "Our aim at RAI is to develop technology that enables future generations of intelligent machines. Working on Atlas with Boston Dynamics enables us to make advances in reinforcement learning on arguably the most sophisticated humanoid robot available. This work will play a crucial role in advancing the capabilities of humanoids not only by expanding its skillset, but also streamlining the process to achieve new skills." News of the partnership arrives a day after Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced that the Bay Area company is abandoning a partnership with OpenAI in favor of developing its own in-house models. "We found that to solve embodied AI at scale in the real world, you have to vertically integrate robot AI," the executive told TechCrunch. "We can't outsource AI for the same reason we can't outsource our hardware." Figure determined that the best AI models for its humanoid are those that are developed specifically for its robots, in-house. OpenAI's approach to embodied intelligence - meaningAI in a physical form - has understandably been less focused given the ChatGPT maker's size and scope. That news also arrived on the heels of rumors that OpenAI has been exploring the creation of its own humanoid robots. Most companies involved in humanoid space are working on their own bespoke AI models. That certainly applies to Boston Dynamics, which has decades of experience developing software to run on its own unique robotics systems. While the RAI Institute is technically a separate organization, both share a parent company, founder, and, presumably, common goals.