The fully electric version of Atlas. Image: Boston Dynamics
Combining TRI’s AI technology with Boston Dynamics’ hardware is ‘game-changing’, said TRI CEO Gill Pratt.
Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a subsidiary of automotive giant Toyota Motor Corporation, have announced a partnership to accelerate the development of humanoid robots by utilising TRI’s large behaviour models (LBM) and Boston Dynamics’ iconic humanoid Atlas robot.
The latest generation of Boston Dynamic’s humanoid electric robot model Atlas, released earlier this year, is the “ideal platform” for advancing the science of AI-based manipulation skills, the US robotics manufacturer said – technology that TRI’s rapidly advancing LBMs are recognised for.
In the announcement made yesterday (16 October), the partnership, designed to leverage each partner’s strength equally, will couple the physical capabilities of the Atlas robot with technology that enables robot operation through computer programmes, allowing the researchers to support the training and advancement of LBMs. It will be co-led by Scott Kuindersma, Boston Dynamic’s senior director of robotics research and Russ Tedrake, the vice-president of robotics research at TRI.
TRI’s work includes a new approach that allows a robot to acquire dexterous behaviours quickly and easily from a generative AI approach called Diffusion Policy. TRI also helped develop OpenVLA, an open-source vision-language-action model and DROID, a large scale robot manipulation dataset.
“Recent advances in AI and machine learning hold tremendous potential for advancing physical intelligence,” said Gill Pratt, TRI’s CEO and Toyota’s chief scientist.
“The opportunity to implement TRI’s state-of-the-art AI technology on Boston Dynamics’ hardware is game-changing for each of our organisations as we work to amplify people and improve quality of life.”
Robert Playter, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, said “there has never been a more exciting time for the robotics industry”.
“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.”
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