Atlas Delivers World Cup Match Ball Before 80,000, Showcasing Hyundai's $26 Billion Robotics Push
Updated
Updated · Fortune · Jul 5
Atlas Delivers World Cup Match Ball Before 80,000, Showcasing Hyundai's $26 Billion Robotics Push
3 articles · Updated · Fortune · Jul 5
Summary
80,000 fans at New York/New Jersey Stadium watched Boston Dynamics' Atlas walk pitchside at halftime, mimic star goal celebrations and hand the referee the match ball in a World Cup first.
Five years of preparation went into the stunt, which Hyundai said was designed to push Atlas into public view and signal that robotics is now a core strategic business, not a side project.
56 degrees of freedom and a 110-pound lift capacity help Atlas move like a human, but Boston Dynamics said its football actions were learned rather than programmed through motion capture and millions of cloud-based simulations.
24 hours of training let Atlas build behaviors that might take a human roughly a year, while engineers hardened it for grass, slips, bad ball placement and other real-world disruptions.
2021 marked Hyundai's takeover of Boston Dynamics, and the automaker now plans a Georgia robotics plant capable of producing 30,000 Atlas units a year by 2028 as factory testing expands.