“Recent advances in AI and machine learning hold tremendous potential for advancing physical intelligence,” said Gill Pratt, chief scientist for Toyota and CEO of TRI. “The opportunity to implement TRI’s state-of-the-art AI technology on Boston Dynamics’ hardware is game-changing for each of our organizations as we work to amplify people and improve quality of life.”

Boston Dynamics manufactures the four-legged robot, Spot, and the humanoid robot, Atlas. Among other things, TRI is known for developing “large behavior models” (LBMs) for robotics. This includes groundbreaking work on diffusion policy, which pioneered the successful application of generative AI to advance dexterous manipulation capabilities in robotics. TRI has also played a leading role in the development of open-source robot AI models and data sets.

The project will leverage the strengths and expertise of each partner equally. The physical capabilities of the Atlas robot, coupled with the ability to command and teleoperate a broad range of whole-body, two-handed manipulation behaviors, will allow research teams to deploy the robot across a range of tasks and collect data on its performance. This data will, in turn, be used to support the training of advanced LBMs.  

The joint team will also conduct research to answer fundamental training questions for humanoid robots, the ability of research models to leverage whole-body sensing, and understanding human-robot interaction and safety/assurance cases to support these new capabilities.