This week Boston Dynamics retired its famous hydraulically powered Atlas robot. And today, it announced its new electric-powered Atlas robot.
It may seem like not much has changed, but Brian Heater of TechCrunch He told TechCrunch Minute that the now-deprecated hydraulic system is outdated. It's not hard to see why Hyundai's Boston Dynamics wanted to go electric. The new Atlas robot is slimmer and appears to have a better range of motion. Size and the ability to bend and maneuver are not superficial factors for humanoid robots. Robots can unlock new use cases and possible work environments.
The new Atlas isn't incredibly well-defined right now, which isn't too surprising considering it's still in development. Still, we do know that it will head to Hyundai's factory first before being brought to the more general market in the future.
Luckily for those of us who want a home robot that can do chores for us or hold our hand when we cry, there are other startups working on humanoid robot projects. There are more companies vying for the same award, including Figure, Agility, Tesla, and more than can be covered in this short article. I'm very excited about this. The more people working on a problem, the faster progress will be made and, hopefully, a general-purpose humanoid robot that can learn.
On that last point, AI will play a role in how robots move from being good at repetitive tasks on set to being able to learn and do more without being directly programmed. It is worth bearing in mind that it will play a big role. It will take time for LLMs to pick up the language, develop the ability to write code, etc., and connect to the robots currently in development, but if you squint far enough, you can find the future. . All I can say is please do it sooner.