Boston Dynamics is decommissioning the Atlas robot

Boston Dynamics has announced that its human-like robot Atlas is retiring after just over a decade with the company, with no details of its successor yet to be announced. The Hyundai-owned company announced Atlas’ plans to retire in a video posted online, noting that the robot has proven capable of performing a wide variety of tasks — from gymnastic exercises to industrial work.

The robot’s ability to perform a wide variety of tasks has been recognized by Boston Dynamics.

The video shows Atlas falling, being pushed and even injuring itself in the form of severed hydraulic hoses. The footage demonstrates how Boston Dynamics used the robot as a development tool. The synopsis for the video says that Atlas «has inspired the next generations of roboticists and broken technical barriers in the field».

Here’s the video’s synopsis.

Atlas was developed for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2013 and was the core of a robotics competition aimed at developing appropriate hard- and software, sensors, and control interfaces. In a blog post, Boston Dynamics noted that Atlas today uses model predictive control — a method that describes «how a robot’s actions will affect its state» and allows the company to predict how that state will change «over a short period of time».

At the time, the robot’s model-based predictive control system is used to predict how the robot’s state will change «over a short period of time.

She explained that the model —s a blessing and a curse: «a simple model can miss important details of the robot’s dynamics, and a complex model can require too much computation to work in real time». Any inaccuracies «will lead to incorrect predictions and actions, which for Atlas usually means a fall».

Atlas.

Different media outlets have noted that Boston Dynamics has no commercial sales for Atlas, as it has with its other robotic products, though some have emphasized that its hydraulic pioneer is already largely obsolete and hinted that the company may have a new model in the pipeline.

Some have noted that Boston Dynamics has no commercial sales for Atlas, as it has for its other robotic products, though some have emphasized that its hydraulic pioneer is already largely obsolete and hinted that the company may have a new model in development.