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Boston Dynamics has retired its most popular robot — but a ‘stronger’ one is finally going up for sale

“Now, it’s time for our hydraulic Atlas robot to kick back and relax.”

A view of Atlas, a robot made by the Boston Dynamics robotics firm.

April 21, 2024

Boston Dynamics is saying goodbye to its most popular robot and an old friend — Atlas.

In a video Tuesday, the company unveiled that it would be parting ways with its humanoid robot Atlas, but not before sharing a supercut of its highlights alongside its blooper lowlights.

“For almost a decade, Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists, and leapt over technical barriers in the field,” the video caption reads. “Now, it’s time for our hydraulic Atlas robot to kick back and relax. Take a look back at everything we’ve accomplished with the Atlas platform to date.”

This also marks a shift in Atlas’s availability to the public. As Boston Dynamics has furthered its research with Atlas, the robot was never intended to be sold. However, on Wednesday, the Waltham company announced that a newer version of Atlas, a humanoid robot, would eventually be available for sale.

A video from the company shows a cool, if not slightly terrifying, humanoid robot standing up, in a way that would be physically impossible for a flesh and blood human being, and looking into the camera.

“We are unveiling the next generation of humanoid robots—a fully electric Atlas robot designed for real-world application,” reads part of the video description.

“We wanted to have a machine that, when we did announce, said to the world that Boston Dynamics just set the bar for humanoids again,” Robert Playter, chief executive at Boston Dynamics, said in an interview with The Boston Globe.

The new Atlas robot would be able to move objects around in a factory, however that is not its most pertinent intended purpose, according to Playter.

“It’s really the logistics within factories of moving the part to the assembly line,” Playter told the newspaper. The new Atlas robot would not have shapes or weights that would be cumbersome for it to handle.

According to Playter, the new Atlas robot will be able to accomplish a multitude of different tasks — hundreds or even thousands — and AI software will be essential for making that the case. This generative tech is already integrated into the company’s Spot and Stretch robots.