The Company Behind the Famous Dancing Robot Retires It and Shows a Humanoid That Runs on Batteries

A day after saying farewell to its hydraulic Atlas, which spent a decade doing backflips in viral videos, Boston Dynamics unveiled an all-electric version meant for real work — quieter, stronger, and able to stand up from flat on its back in a way no person can.

Boston Dynamics released two videos this week. The first, on Tuesday, was a farewell: a highlight reel of its Atlas robot — the one that jumped, ran, and did backflips in videos watched by hundreds of millions of people — ending with clips of it falling over, leaking hydraulic fluid, and being retired. The second, today, introduced its replacement. The new Atlas is electric.

That word carries the news. The old robot was powered by hydraulics, the same technology as an excavator: powerful, heavy, loud, and prone to leaking. Electric motors are quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to maintain, and until recently they weren't strong enough to move a human-sized body the way hydraulics could. The new video opens with the robot lying face down on the floor, folding its legs backward over its body in a way no human joint allows, and rising to standing. Then its head turns around to face the camera. The company knows what it is doing.

Boston Dynamics is the oldest name in this business — it was founded in 1992, has been owned by Google and SoftBank, and now belongs to Hyundai — and its videos have defined what people think a robot looks like. But its robots have mostly been research machines. The company says this one is for work, starting in Hyundai's car factories, and that it will be tested there over the next few years.

It arrives in a crowded field. Figure showed a humanoid taking spoken orders last month; Tesla, Agility, and several Chinese companies have their own. For thirty years the question was whether a walking humanoid robot was possible. The question now is whether one can be useful, and cheap enough to matter.