‘The robot never gets tired’: Hyundai explains why its Boston Dynamics Atlas robot is ready to take over factories, but not your home
This year, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was full of humanoid robots. Brands used small dancing droids to lure crowds to the stands, while teams of amateur engineers performed impromptu robotic outings in the parking lot.
As a result, it was easy to dismiss these often tiny pieces of technology as a novelty – until Hyundai’s 90kg Atlas humanoid robot arrived on stage a day before the show opened to the public.
Due to launch mass production in the company’s new Robot Metaplant Application Center (RMAC), Atlas will begin deployment across Hyundai’s various smart factories in 2028, aiming to manufacture some 30,000 units by 2030.
“Over the past few decades, most manufacturers have automated everything they can automate,” says Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics.
“The work that remains is difficult to automate cost-effectively. And that’s because the tasks vary so much. Whether it’s the parts that vary from car to car or because the tasks involve assembly and close tolerance and things you can’t do with traditional robots,” he adds.
Consistency is key
During various demonstrations at the Hyundai booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which was by far one of the most popular this year, Atlas could be seen moving auto parts from one storage area to another – his 56-degree movement allowing him to rotate his entire body to move between storage bins, rather than having to walk.
Likewise, his dexterous fingers could grasp an array of objects, even the smallest and delicate, and move them with precision. Weather resistance ensures that it can operate outdoors and when its batteries run out, it simply heads to a charging station and replaces them itself.
While the speed at which Atlas could perform these tasks wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, Boston Dynamics Chief Strategy Officer Marc Theerman told me that wasn’t really the point.
“Humans may be very efficient at 9 a.m., but our studies suggest that this efficiency decreases throughout the day. With this type of automation, you need consistency, and the robot never gets tired, and it operates at a constant speed with little intervention,” he explains.
In this regard, Atlas was designed to be implemented on the type of changes and tasks that would prompt unions to call a strike. Downtime? Certainly not. The company has ensured that most of Atlas’s parts are easily interchangeable should the worst happen.
“If an arm, leg or even hand is broken, these parts can be replaced by anyone with the slightest bit of training in a matter of minutes,” says Theerman. “This is something we learned from our Spot robot: our customers don’t want downtime repairing robots,” he adds.
Believe the hype
While humanoid robots are currently at the very epicenter of the hype cycle, there is a valid reason to choose this form. Theerman says he predicts many Atlas units will be used in facilities that were never designed for robots.
“The average factory in Europe or the United States is probably 35 years old. And so if you want to automate a factory like that, without fixed automation, you need something that looks like a human, because that’s what the factory was designed for,” he says.
A quick review of Boston Dynamics’ catalog reveals many other robots, such as its Stretch logistics robot, used solely for warehouse operations, that can be implemented for very specific tasks.
But what sets Atlas apart is the fact that it can perform many tasks and, thanks to advances in AI and, in particular, large behavioral models (which Google’s DeepMind contributes to), the humanoid can be trained in a few days to perform complex actions.
“So far, we’ve focused on the physical aspect of AI, so Atlas can dance, run and jump. But behavior is the next frontier. We hope that in the future, customers will be able to swap the humanoid’s hands for specific tools, so it can learn how to weld, build and more,” adds Theerman.
At this point, it’s worth noting that Hyundai’s humanoid project is not the first of its kind, nor is it the only technology in existence. In fact, there is a veritable arms race to launch useful robots.
Tesla’s Optimus is designed for general-purpose tasks, but early demonstrations have revealed that it still has a way to go before it’s truly useful. Likewise, companies such as Figure AI, Agility Robotics and Apptronik are all making waves in the emerging sector.
In fact, Chinese heavy equipment maker Zoomlion already has a team of humanoid robots busy at work in its network of factories, producing hundreds of products per day.
But the CEO of Boston Dynamic still believes his company has the advantage, particularly because it benefits from the financial and industrial backing of the Hyundai Motor Group.
“We already have a path that we’re on with our existing products to bring them to market. We’ve built our organization around field product support, integration, service, repair, logistics, so all the components around that. Something that, fortunately, no one else has done yet,” he says.
Oh, humanity
The question of replacing humans is carefully brushed aside by those in the robotics sector, as the technology has the potential to replace large swaths of manual labor. Fortunately, Atlas, much like its counterpart Spot, is currently expensive and many factories find it cheaper and more practical to use a human workforce.
But Boston Dynamics’ chief strategy officer believes that while this could be a potential problem, he has found that companies that embrace robotics more are more productive, therefore grow faster, are more profitable and hire more employees.
“Yes, there will be a change in personnel, but we think that for now these robots will still require human supervision. That’s why we call this job ‘robot wrestler’ or ‘robot operator’. And this job is growing quite quickly and is fascinating,” says Theerman.
And what about your robot butler? Well, the CEO of Boston Dynamics thinks that’s far from the case. In fact, he believes that robots in the home are not a good strategy, citing the fact that the consumer market is very “cost sensitive.” He also admits that safety is paramount and that the home is a “complex environment”.
“We think it will be around 2028 or 2030 that robots will be deployed in factories and probably five years later before they are really affordable in homes,” Playter says.
Mark your journals. The year 2035 could be when we finally witness the rise of robots, or find out if it’s just another hype cycle that will gradually fade into the CES archives.
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