Robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Monday a strategic partnership with Google’s AI research lab to speed up the development of its next-generation humanoid robot Atlas — and make it act more human around people.
The partnership, which was announced during the Hyundai press conference at CES 2026, is centered on robotics research that will use Google DeepMind’s AI foundation models. Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas will be the first test case, according to Carolina Parada, senior director of robotics at Google DeepMind.
“We’re looking to integrate our cutting-edge AI foundation models with Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robots, and we’ll aim to develop the world’s most advanced robot foundation model to fulfill the promise of true general-purpose human needs,” Parada said on stage.
The tie-up comes less than a year after the Google AI research lab announced new AI models called Gemini Robotics that are designed to allow robots to perceive, reason, use tools, and interact with humans. Gemini Robotics is based on a large-scale multimodal generative AI model, Gemini. At the time, Google DeepMind said the robotics AI model was trained to generalize behavior across a range of different robotics hardware.
Enter Boston Dynamics, and its majority owner, Hyundai Motor Group. While accelerating research will be a central piece of this partnership, this has real-world scaling intent.
Boston Dynamics already has products, like the quadruped Spot, that are in customers’ hands in more than 40 countries. Its warehouse robot Stretch has unloaded more than 20 million boxes globally since its launch in 2023, according to Hyundai. Now Boston Dynamics and Hyundai are preparing for the next generation, starting with the humanoid robot Atlas, which the company announced Monday is already in production and headed to a Hyundai factory.
A prototype of Atlas walked on stage during the press conference, showing off its ability to move. But as Alberto Rodriguez, director of Atlas behavior at Boston Dynamics, noted, making “Atlas into a product requires more than athletic performance for humanoids to really deliver on their promise. They have to be able to interact with people naturally.”
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Rodriguez and his counterparts at Boston Dynamics believe that recent advancements in AI have created a clear path to get to those capabilities.
