Hyundai Motor-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) entered into a research partnership last week, in a bid to replicate Tesla Inc.'s (NASDAQ:TSLA) progress with its Optimus humanoid robot.
What Happened: The newly announced partnership is aimed at accelerating the development of humanoid robots. The partnership will bring together TRI's Large Behavior Models and Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot, in a bid to deploy the robot across tasks by enhancing its whole-body skills.
"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," said Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics.
The partnership will be co-lead by Scott Kuindersma, senior director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics, and Russ Tedrake, vice president of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute. TRI is owned by Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE:TM).
Why It Matters: EV giant Tesla showcased its Optimus bots at its robotaxi unveiling event earlier this month. About 20 active robots walked through the crowd assembled at the event. Optimus poured drinks, handed out snacks, and performed dance moves.
However, the robots were human-assisted to "some extent" to showcase the company's vision at the event, Tesla Head of Engineering For Optimus Milan Kovac said in a post on X.
Kovac also said that the company's development on Optimus was greatly boosted by the company's work on driver assistance features deployed on its EV fleet. The same technology, Kovac said, is used on both the car and the Tesla bot, barring some details and the dataset needed to train the Optimus' AI.
In July, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the EV company would have "genuinely useful" humanoid robots in low production for use within its factories next year. The company will "hopefully" increase production for other customers in 2026, he said.
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