Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) have announced a significant advancement in robotics, revealing that their joint research has enabled the Atlas humanoid robot to perform complex tasks autonomously. The organizations released a video showing Atlas using whole-body movements such as walking, crouching, and lifting to complete a sequence of packing, sorting, and organizing activities. During these demonstrations, researchers introduced unexpected challenges mid-task, prompting Atlas to adjust its actions in real time.
The new capabilities are powered by Large Behavior Models (LBMs), which allow for rapid addition of skills through human demonstrations rather than traditional hand-programming. This approach enables the robot to treat manipulation with its hands and locomotion with its feet under a single control system. Traditionally, robots have separated low-level movement from arm manipulation; this project integrates both functions.
The collaboration between Boston Dynamics and TRI began in October 2024 with the goal of accelerating smart robot development by combining expertise from both organizations. According to Scott Kuindersma, vice president of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics: “This work provides a glimpse into how we’re thinking about building general-purpose robots that will transform how we live and work. Training a single neural network to perform many long-horizon manipulation tasks will lead to better generalization, and highly capable robots like Atlas present the fewest barriers to data collection for tasks requiring whole-body precision, dexterity, and strength.”
Russ Tedrake, senior vice president of Large Behavior Models at Toyota Research Institute added: “One of the main value propositions of humanoids is that they can achieve a huge variety of tasks directly in existing environments, but the previous approaches to programming these tasks simply could not scale to meet this challenge. Large Behavior Models address this opportunity in a fundamentally new way – skills are added quickly via demonstrations from humans, and as the LBMs get stronger, they require less and less demonstrations to achieve more and more robust behaviors.”
The project is co-led by Kuindersma and Tedrake. Their research focuses on advancing understanding of large models for whole-body control in humanoid robots.
Further technical details are available at https://bostondynamics.com/blog/large-behavior-models-atlas-find-new-footing/.
Boston Dynamics develops mobile robots for industrial use across manufacturing facilities, power plants, construction sites, warehouses, and distribution centers. Its portfolio includes Spot for inspections and public safety applications; Stretch for logistics operations; and Atlas as an electric humanoid platform currently under development.
Toyota Research Institute conducts research aimed at enhancing human ability through technology advancements in automated driving systems, energy solutions, artificial intelligence models—including large behavior models—and robotics.
