BOSTON, MA—Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) are joining forces to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoid robots.

“There has never been a more exciting time for the robotics industry, and we look forward to working with TRI to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoids,” said Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics. “This partnership is an example of two companies with a strong research-and-development foundation coming together to work on many complex challenges and build useful robots that solve real-world problems.”

“Recent advances in AI and machine learning hold tremendous potential for advancing physical intelligence,” said Gill Pratt, chief scientist for Toyota and CEO of TRI. “The opportunity to implement TRI’s state-of-the-art AI technology on Boston Dynamics’ hardware is game-changing for each of our organizations as we work to amplify people and improve quality of life.”

Boston Dynamics manufactures the four-legged robot, Spot, and the humanoid robot, Atlas. Among other things, TRI is known for developing “large behavior models” (LBMs) for robotics. This includes groundbreaking work on diffusion policy, which pioneered the successful application of generative AI to advance dexterous manipulation capabilities in robotics. TRI has also played a leading role in the development of open-source robot AI models and data sets.

The project will leverage the strengths and expertise of each partner equally. The physical capabilities of the Atlas robot, coupled with the ability to command and teleoperate a broad range of whole-body, two-handed manipulation behaviors, will allow research teams to deploy the robot across a range of tasks and collect data on its performance. This data will, in turn, be used to support the training of advanced LBMs.