Boston Dynamics

From a university lab to machines that could leave it

Marc Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992 as a spinout from MIT's Leg Lab. He had been an MIT professor, and the company's early identity grew around the difficult problem of making machines move and balance. Its own history places BigDog's move into outdoor terrain in 2004 and the first Atlas in 2013. Those were important steps toward robots that could operate beyond a fixed workstation.³⁴

The business passed through several owners as that research developed. Google acquired it in 2013. SoftBank announced an agreement to buy it from Alphabet in 2017. Hyundai Motor Group completed its controlling acquisition in June 2021. That last change connected a robot developer with a large manufacturing organization that could also become a customer.¹⁴⁵⁶⁹

Spot became commercially available in 2020, and Stretch was unveiled in 2021. Those products gave the research a more specific commercial purpose: move through a facility to inspect it, or handle the boxes passing through a logistics operation. Atlas adds a humanoid approach to the company’s range, aimed at industrial manipulation.¹³

On January 5, 2026, Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind announced joint Atlas research using Gemini Robotics for industrial tasks, initially in automotive settings. This is a research collaboration; the announcement does not establish performance achieved by a delivered fleet.¹¹

Atlas reaches Hyundai's training floor

The all-electric Atlas made its debut in 2024, and Boston Dynamics unveiled the product version in January 2026. By September, the company said Atlas robots were training at the Robotics Metaplant Application Center on Hyundai's Georgia campus. Parts sequencing is a useful example: arranging components in the order an assembly process needs them. It is a concrete industrial job with an environment that engineers can study and prepare.³⁸⁹

Rohit Prasad became chief executive on October 7, 2026. He previously served as Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence. His experience adds a software and AI perspective to a company whose portfolio spans inspection, logistics and humanoid development.¹

Products and their roles

The three product lines address different parts of industrial work, from inspecting a site to moving its materials.¹

Follow the job as well as the robot

Boston Dynamics offers a useful view of the engineering behind mobile robots: navigating a site, handling objects and fitting into a working routine. Its purchasing policy is directed at commercial, industrial, enterprise and university research customers, and excludes individual non-commercial purchases.¹⁷

Start with the work you want done. Inspecting equipment, moving boxes and arranging parts for assembly are different jobs. For a business considering a robot, ask which model fits the task, how the workspace must be prepared and who handles training, maintenance and recovery when something goes wrong. Those questions are useful for following future home robots too.¹⁷⁹

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