By Adam Levine

Boston Dynamics has been on the cutting edge of robotics since 1992, and it has unveiled its most ambitious plan yet to monetize those decades of research.

On stage Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the first commercial version of its Atlas humanoid robot, designed for industrial work.

Boston Dynamics is owned by several Hyundai affiliates and SoftBank. Monday's presentation leaned into the company's relationship with the Hyundai Motor Group, and its giant factory complex in Georgia. Much like Tesla is doing with its Optimus robots, a large auto plant will be the Atlas robots' proving ground.

This year, the new Atlas will start moving onto the factory floor and training for the tasks it will be taking over. There is a steep learning curve, but teams of robots can learn collaboratively, with each lesson propagated through the fleet. Hyundai plans to begin deploying Atlas in 2028, and by 2030, the company expects to be rolling out the robots through its global manufacturing footprint.

By then, Hyundai believes Atlas will have proven its worth in industrial settings, and there will be more outside buyers. Boston Dynamics will also lease the robots, hoping to bring in customers who might balk at an upfront capital outlay.

Hyundai is constructing a new factory that will be capable of pumping out 30,000 Atlas robots a year.

Atlas stands at just over six feet tall, and weighs 198 pounds. It can go four hours on a charge, and swaps out its own batteries.

Boston Dynamics has spent over a decade on Atlas, and the new commercial model will be the fourth iteration. The company has focused on making Atlas strong, nimble, versatile and aware of its surroundings. But cutting-edge artificial intelligence was the missing piece for making it a truly valuable industrial worker. For that, Boston Dynamics announced a new partnership with Alphabet's Google to integrate its Gemini AI models into Atlas' platform. It will make the robots smarter, help them learn faster, and enable more natural interactions with people.

Boston Dynamics was spun out of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology robotics lab in 1992. For the first decade of its existence, it was a research and development contractor for the U.S. Defense Department. At the end of this period, the first Atlas robot made its debut as part of the Robotics Challenge at the federal government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, more commonly known as DARPA.

Google liked what they saw in that early prototype, and bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 for an undisclosed amount. The company's robot videos were popular on Youtube, but the costs continued to pile up. As part of an effort to thin out its money-losing "moonshot" investments with no near-term revenue prospects, Google sold Boston Dynamics to Softbank in 2017. CEO Masayoshi Son thought he could commercialize Spot, Boston Dynamics' canine robot, but that had little success. Tiring of the losses, in 2021 Softbank sold 80% of the company to several Hyundai affiliates for $1.1 billion.

Now it is Hyundai's turn to try to turn this money pit into a profit center.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 06, 2026 14:02 ET (19:02 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.