Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, Atlas, is set to commence operations at a Hyundai plant in the United States in 2025.
The fully electric bot is capable of sorting car parts, carrying heavy loads, running, crawling, and tumbling. It will be deployed at the Hyundai Metaplant in Georgia to test its capabilities in real factory conditions.
“By the end of this year, we plan to place Atlas at a Hyundai facility in the U.S. to evaluate the robot’s current capabilities in the real context of tasks we aim to address in the coming years,” stated Scott Kuindersma, Senior Director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics.
The introduction of the android coincides with advancements in artificial intelligence and large language models (LLM), which, according to Kuindersma, could significantly enhance the capabilities of Atlas and similar robots.
“Thus, figuring out how to bridge this gap so we can take some of the generalization capabilities of smart reasoning, like LLM and similar technologies that are permeating everyone’s lives, and apply them in the physical intelligence of robots is precisely the challenge researchers face. And if we make progress in this direction in the next couple of years, it could be a real game-changer,” the expert added.
He noted that robots like Atlas will not appear in homes for a long time and will be primarily used in industry due to safety concerns.
“Why create elite humanoid athletes? It’s a very fair question, and we think that many types of work you might want a humanoid to do are those that are essentially grueling for humans. These are really complex, ergonomically unsuitable tasks that we ask or require people to do right now. And we believe robots will be much better suited to perform them,” Kuindersma explained.
Back in April 2024, Boston Dynamics introduced the fully electric android Atlas for commercial use.
In April 2025, production of Tesla’s Optimus robots was disrupted due to export restrictions on rare earth metals imposed by Beijing amid escalating trade tensions with Washington.