The man who taught machines to jump

For forty years, his robots jumped to prove they could. From now on, they will jump only if the shift requires it. The company behind robotics' most-watched videos now has a single owner, and the owner makes cars.

The news fits in one contract line: in mid-July, Hyundai Motor Group announced the purchase of the roughly 10% of Boston Dynamics that SoftBank still held, about $325 million according to Bloomberg, and the world's most famous robotics company came to have a single owner. It was no impulse: SoftBank exercised a put option agreed in the 2021 contract, which let it exit if the company remained unlisted. The interesting part is not the clause but the plan that comes with it: Hyundai wants the Atlas humanoid welding and moving materials at its Georgia factory in 2028, expanding into assembly by 2030, with a stated ambition of up to 30,000 units a year.

The professor builds the lab, the lab becomes a show, the show gets sold three times. And when the final buyer wants to turn it into a tool, the professor is already back in the lab.

To measure what has just been sold whole, you have to go back to 1980, to a Carnegie Mellon lab where an engineer named Marc Raibert built an absurd machine: a one-legged robot that stayed upright by hopping, like a pole vaulter without a pole. Raibert's intuition, MIT PhD in 1977, ran against the grain: balance is not stillness, it is controlled motion. He took his Leg Lab to MIT, and in 1992 founded a company to commercialize it all without quite knowing what he would sell; he thought it might end up a simulation software house. He called it Boston Dynamics.

What he ended up selling was wonder. From the lab came BigDog, the military mule engineers kicked to prove it would not fall, and then the video era: Atlas doing parkour, Atlas landing a backflip, Spot dancing. No marketing department in robotics history has done so much with so little script. And while the videos gathered hundreds of millions of views, the company changed hands like a relay baton: Google bought it in 2013, SoftBank in 2017, Hyundai took 80% in 2021 at a $1.1 billion valuation. This July's purchase, implying a valuation near $3.3 billion, says the price of wonder has tripled in five years.

The man who started it all no longer owns any of this, and that may be the most elegant part of the story. Raibert stepped down as CEO in 2019 and in 2022 founded a research institute, today the RAI Institute, to do exactly what he was doing in 1980: ask how a body moves, with no delivery date. The full cycle reads like a fable: the professor builds the lab, the lab becomes a show, the show gets sold three times, and when the final buyer at last wants to turn it into a tool, the professor is already back in the lab.

Here this publication takes out its magnifying glass. The verifiable: the money is real, the put option is real, and the electric Atlas demos (unveiled in April 2024, when the hydraulic one was retired) show tasks Boston Dynamics declares autonomous, with no signs of teleoperation. What does not yet exist: a full shift of Atlas working in public. The 30,000 units a year are a target, not a production line, and 2028 is a presentation date, not a contract. Meanwhile, Digit already bills for real shifts in logistics and Optimus remains in preproduction: in the humanoid race, the one with the best videos has yet to clock in at any factory.

For the reader, the translation is this: when a carmaker pays to keep 100% of a legendary lab, it is saying the next decade of humanoids will be decided in factories, not in living rooms or on stages. It is the same pattern as when Amazon bought Locus's robots... and their owners: the industrial buyer does not collect demos, it buys capacity. What to watch has dates: the first images of Atlas at the Georgia plant, whether 2028 holds as a date, and whether Hyundai turns into a business what was, for forty years, above all the circus's best act. The viral videos were the laboratory. Welding at three in the morning, with no cameras, will be the exam.