Atlas Robot First Look - Boston Dynamics at CES 2026

We see Atlas as the ultimate tool. We know that it's going to be going into environments and doing tasks alongside people for a long time. And so with Atlas, we just see work changing. And we've designed Atlas to work alongside people and to drop into and out of person-centered environments so that it's a tool. Guys, we had an exclusive opportunity to talk with Boston Dynamics about their new Atlas robot that's blowing up right now. This is our Atlas robot, and one of the things that makes it unique is its head, which both looks different and also has all of the cameras and compute fully integrated. So this is actually a modular head with the sensors and computer on board. It has 360-degree sensing, and we're the first humanoid robot to have a certifiable safety system. So we've learned from the autonomous vehicle industry about how you can really reliably detect people and hazards around the robot, and the robot has that built in because we know that to deploy this for real, you need to get the factory safety officers on board. You need to have a system that's designed for that from the beginning. So we've taken that safety very seriously from the start, and if you look at the legs, this has some passive cooling, and it is also spaced out so you don't have pinch points. This is something that you could actually expect someone to use in the field of minimal training and to be a tool that they don't need a whole lab to deal with. Elbows can go all the way. The shoulders, I think, have a range of motion up about here. The legs can go almost all the way around, likewise with the hips, and then the torso and head can both spin around completely. So you can see things even like handles that are built into the torso so that a customer in the field can move the robot easily. The batteries are removable so that the robot can swap its own batteries, and so if you're running the robot in a lab setting, you can swap the batteries yourself and keep continuous uptime. We've got power, ethernet, other common ports on the back. The head is also completely self-contained and modular, so you could remove the head, keep it on your desk as a separate computer, do development there, and then put it on the robot if you want. Or as sensors and compute get better, you can upgrade the head and keep the same robot. So if you wanna disengage these things when they go rogue, you just have to run behind it and pull the batteries out. That's the way, huh? Yeah, if robots go rogue, which I think we're a long way away from, I'd recommend a good net. Yeah, yeah. As more sophisticated models get trained using NVIDIA processors or through Google or wherever, Atlas is gonna benefit from that. We also have some opportunity to improve the battery life on Atlas with more efficient compute on board. We've built this amazing athletic intelligence that helps our robots move through the world in incredible ways and makes for some amazing YouTube videos. And over the last couple of years, AI techniques have improved enough that we can start to do manipulation, have the robot touch the world, move objects around, understand the world the same way that people do. So Atlas can lift up to 110 pounds instantaneously and closer to 70 kind of continuously. So Atlas can lift these really heavy loads. It can operate for four hours on its battery life, swap its own battery so it can work continuously. Once this thing learns a skill, that information, that knowledge base is transferable to all other units in the fleet. Is that correct? One robot learns, information passes to all of them in the entire fleet. Exactly. That's crazy. And that lets our customers like adapt their production line on the fly. So you can have this fleet of robots that has all of the institutional knowledge about how to build everything your factory makes. And if the product changes tomorrow, you can just flash reprogram them and then you're starting to produce something new. Atlas has these joints that can spin all the way around. And so we're inspired by the human form, but not limited by it. And that means that Atlas can move faster than a person through different tasks, much more ergonomically. It also helps the robot be a lot more reliable. We don't have any cables flapping around or any cables that are bending. Everything's integrated into these joints that can move in really incredible ways. It feels like to me, we're getting dangerously close to a world where these things are going to be incredibly capable to do things all by themselves. How do you see these units coexisting with human beings in the future? So we're not trying to make a robot person. We're trying to make this tool that's relatable, that's understandable, and the choice of the head kind of like whimsical and inviting.