Boston Dynamics, Toyota Research Institute partner to advance robotics research

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced that the companies will join forces, combining two of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence and robotics.

The research partnership aims to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoid robots utilizing TRI’s Large Behavior Models and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot.

Partnership looks to push humanoid research further

Boston Dynamics has a longstanding reputation for advances in humanoids, from extreme mobility to bimanual manipulation. The latest generation of Atlas is the result of years of hardware/software co-design aimed at building the most capable humanoid platform, both in terms of physical capability and software interfaces for authoring whole-body behaviors.

This combination, according to the companies, makes it an ideal platform for advancing the science of AI-based manipulation skills.

“There has never been a more exciting time for the robotics industry, and we look forward to working with TRI to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoids,” said Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics. “This partnership is an example of two companies with a strong research-and-development foundation coming together to work on many complex challenges and build useful robots that solve real-world problems.”

Concurrently, TRI is widely recognized as a leader in the rapid advancement of Large Behavior Models (LBMs) for robotics. This includes work on diffusion policy, which pioneered the successful application of generative AI to advance dexterous manipulation capabilities in robotics, according to the company.

TRI has also played a leading role in the development of open-source robot AI models and datasets. Leveraging additional strength in computer vision and large-language model training, TRI’s work on LBMs aims to achieve multi-task, vision-and-language-conditioned foundation models for dexterous manipulation.

“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.”

Scott Kuindersma, senior director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics, and Russ Tedrake, vice president of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute, will co-lead the Boston-based research partnership.

The project is designed to equally leverage the strengths and expertise of each partner. The physical capabilities of the new electric Atlas robot, coupled with the ability to programmatically command and teleoperate a broad range of whole-body bimanual 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, utilizing rigorous hardware and simulation evaluation to demonstrate that large, pre-trained models can enable the rapid acquisition of new robust, dexterous, whole-body skills.

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.