Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot has been impressing us with its acrobatics and other antics over the last decade, but the company just announced that it’s retiring the bipedal bot.
“Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists, and leapt over technical barriers in the field,” Boston Dynamics said in comments accompanying a YouTube video (top) celebrating the contraption. “Now it’s time for our hydraulic Atlas robot to kick back and relax.”
The video illustrates just how far the Boston Dynamics team has come with Atlas through plenty of footage showing the robot taking a tumble during numerous tests on challenging terrain and trying to jump between platforms.
After much development, the talented team had created an incredibly agile machine capable of replicating human movement with astonishing accuracy. In fact, it could do plenty of things that human’s can’t, including somersaults and parkour. Funky dance moves were also part of its repertoire.
It’s not clear why Boston Dynamics has retired Atlas. Digital Trends has reached out to the company for more information and we’ll update this article when we hear back.
Despite earlier videos indicating that the company had been considering commercializing Atlas for work in locations like warehouses, things clearly haven’t worked out in the same way that it has for another Boston Dynamics robot, the dog-like Spot.
The team apparently felt that Atlas had reached its potential, though engineers who worked on the project will have learned plenty that can be carried over to future endeavors.
The video even leaves us with a little teaser suggesting Atlas could one day be rebooted, as it ends with the message: “Til we meet again.” At the least, it feels like Boston Dynamics will be unveiling an even more impressive robot in the not-too-distant future.
Related Posts
The Digital Trends App Bundle is yours to try for a whole week, free
Start your free trial
The Galaxy S26 Ultra might not see much of a battery upgrade after all
The Samsung Galaxy Ultra models have had the same battery capacity for the last five years.
The Galaxy Tab S10 Lite is official, and it’ll be here sooner than you think
The Galaxy Tab S10 Lite will have a 10.9-inch display and a peak brightness of 600 nits — a bit on the lower side, versus the iPad Pro's maximum brightness of 1,600 nits.