By
Lloyd Lee
New
Every time Lloyd publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!
By clicking “Sign up”, you agree to receive emails from Business Insider. In addition, you accept Insider’s
Terms of Service and
Privacy Policy.
Follow Lloyd Lee
- Hyundai's Boston Dynamics unveiled the latest version of Atlas, a 200-pound humanoid robot.
- Hyundai plans to deploy the robots at its Georgia factory by 2028.
- Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter told Business Insider what needs to happen to get there.
Two years. That's the ambitious timeline Boston Dynamics set for its Atlas humanoid robots to start working on Hyundai's factory floor.
The company's CEO, Robert Playter, told Business Insider at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Atlas will need to hit several milestones within that timeframe to get there, including an ability to learn fast.
"We need to be able to bring a new task to bear in a day or two," Playter said. "And that's because, I think in a factory, there's literally hundreds of tasks and the tasks evolve."
Atlas is a six-foot, 200-pound, bipedal robot with a face inspired by Disney's Pixar lamp.
Hyundai, which has a controlling majority stake in Boston Dynamics, revealed on Monday its plans to deploy Atlas at its sprawling factory in Ellabell, Georgia, by 2028.
The big pitch behind Atlas is that the robot will be able to learn industrial tasks quickly and adapt to the existing floor plan of a factory by leveraging artificial intelligence.
"If you're going to have a robot that's actually useful in the factory, it's got to do a hundred different tasks, not just one or two," he said.
Boston Dynamics announced on Monday a partnership with Google DeepMind, Alphabet's AI research lab.
Playter is hinging on AI's advancement within the next two years to unlock Atlas' ability to learn quickly, reason, and, in the near future, interact with its human coworkers.
"It's really AI that's going to enable that," he said. "We also have to make that unprecedented reliability, 99.9% reliable. The AI is not quite there yet, but it's very promising."
The CEO said Atlas will start with simpler tasks at Hyundai's automotive plant, such as parts sequencing or organizing car parts in the right order before they're sent to the assembly line.
"That's really a logistics task," he said. "And then we're going to evolve as the product and as the capabilities get more sophisticated. We're going to eventually start entering assembly tasks."
