Tech & Toys

Hyundai's Boston Dynamics to Debut New Atlas Humanoid Robot
By Goldsea Staff | 22 Dec, 2025

Using electric motors instead of hydraulics allows the new Atlas to be more dexterous, stronger and able to operate outside the assembly-line context.

The new Boston Dynamics electric Atlas will be more dexterous and mobile than its hydraulic predecessor. (Boston Dynamics Photo)

Hyundai Motor Group will debut its next-generation Atlas humanoid robots at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show January 6 - 9 in Las Vegas.  At the event it plans to outline strategies to accelerate commercialization of AI robotics.

Atlas is the successor to the Spot and Stretch humanoid mobile robots released over the past several years to tackle the difficult tasks in industries that must operate outside the assembly line contest to handle tasks in the real-world.  Boston Dynamics plans to partner with a small group of innovative customers, beginning with its parent Hyundai, to test and iterate Atlas applications over the next few years.  

The new electric version of Atlas represents a leap over earlier humanoid robots in that it will be powered by a large number of electric motors rather than hydraulics.  The electric version is both stronger and more dexterous, with a wider range of motion than all previous humanoid robots.  The last generation hydraulic Atlas (HD Atlas) could already lift and maneuver a wide variety of heavy, irregular objects.  The electric version adds several new gripper variations for more versatile manipulation of objects in real environments.

Atlas will be linked to BD's Orbit centralized platform which serves as the command center for customers' entire robot fleets, along with site maps and digital transformation data generated by 1,500 deployments of Spot.  Spot and Stretch are currently serving as digital twins to assist in the development of Atlas as well as to help customers modify their production environment for optimal deployments of humanoid robots.