Boston Dynamics’ Next-Gen Humanoid Robot Will Have Google DeepMind DNA

Boston Dynamics has entered into a partnership with Google DeepMind to accelerate the development of its next-generation humanoid robot, Atlas, to make it behave more naturally around humans.

The collaboration was announced Monday during a press conference hosted by Hyundai Motor Group at CES 2026. The partnership will focus on robotics research powered by Google DeepMind’s AI foundation models, with Atlas serving as the first significant test platform, according to Carolina Parada, senior director of robotics at Google DeepMind.

“We’re looking to integrate our cutting-edge AI foundation models with Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robots, and we’ll aim to develop the world’s most advanced robot foundation model to fulfill the promise of true general-purpose human needs,” Parada said onstage.

The announcement comes less than a year after Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics, a set of AI models designed to enable robots to perceive their surroundings, reason about tasks, use tools, and interact with people. Gemini Robotics is built on Gemini, a large-scale multimodal generative AI model, and was trained to generalize behaviour across different robotic platforms.

Boston Dynamics, together with its majority owner, Hyundai, is positioning the partnership not only as a research effort but also as a pathway to large-scale, real-world deployment. The company already has commercial robots in the field, including its quadruped robot Spot, which customers use in more than 40 countries. Its warehouse robot Stretch has unloaded more than 20 million boxes worldwide since its launch in 2023, according to Hyundai.

Attention is now turning to Atlas, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot. The company said Monday that Atlas is already in production and will be deployed at Hyundai’s factory in Savannah, Georgia. During the CES press event, a prototype of Atlas walked onstage, demonstrating its mobility and balance.

However, Boston Dynamics executives emphasized that physical agility alone is not enough. Alberto Rodriguez, director of Atlas behaviour at Boston Dynamics, said turning Atlas into a usable product requires far more than athletic movement.

“Making Atlas into a product requires more than athletic performance for humanoids to really deliver on their promise,” Rodriguez said. “They have to be able to interact with people naturally.”

Boston Dynamics believes recent advances in artificial intelligence now make that goal achievable. Natural interaction is also critical from a safety perspective. Atlas, formally unveiled as a product on Monday, features 56 degrees of freedom, rotational joints, and human-scale hands equipped with tactile sensing. The robot can lift to 110 pounds and is designed to perform repetitive industrial tasks.

Given that level of strength and dexterity, safe collaboration with humans is essential. Some safeguards are built into the hardware, including 360-degree cameras that enable Atlas to detect nearby people. The partnership with DeepMind is expected to help the robot learn appropriate behaviour in shared environments.

“Rather than having a set of predefined tasks loaded onto the robot, we think robots should understand the physical world the same way we do,” Parada said. “They should learn from experience, generalize to new situations, and improve quickly over time.”

Hyundai plans to introduce Atlas into its manufacturing operations later this year and expects to begin using the humanoid robots for tasks such as parts sequencing by 2028. To support that rollout, Hyundai also announced the opening of a new U.S. facility, the Robot Metaplant Application Centre (RMAC).

The RMAC will be used to train robots on movements such as lifting and turning. Training data from the facility will be combined with real-world operational data collected through software systems at Hyundai’s Georgia factory, enabling the robots to improve continually.

The announcement marks a significant step in the convergence of advanced robotics and generative AI, as Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind collaborate to bring humanoid robots closer to everyday industrial use.

This article was updated to include additional details about Atlas’ specifications.