New Atlas and Israeli Robot

Boston Dynamics has gone for an electric robot.

Hello Everyone,

This week two things have caught my attention, work of Mentee Robotics and the new Atlas prototype from Boston Dynamics, that robotics company that has been based around a lot and used to be owned by Google.

Mentee comes from Israel and the Mobileye founder, an incredible AV startup that was acquired by Intel and then spun out. Mobileye is easily one of my favorite companies. But wait there’s more connections, its co-founder and chair, Amnon Shashua, founded Mobileye and the well-funded AI firm, AI21 Labs. I’ve covered AI21 Labs several times in my Newsletter and even did a Native Sponsor for them.

Let’s circle back to Mentee later, I want to show you the weird design and form factor of the New Atlas.

Atlas just went electric. And I like how it moves.

Boston Dynamics have taken all that they learned over 15 years of research in hydraulic Atlas platform and put it into the next generation of the program, a fully electric Atlas robot designed for real-world applications with super-human performance.

It looks like an industrial humanoid general purpose robot alright, just what I was hoping from Boston Dynamics. This is a company that was founded way back in 1992, ancient compared to some of the flashy new robotics companies getting huge funding today like Figure or Agility.

Electric Atlas Design

Atlas was originally envisioned as a search-and-rescue robot and Boston Dynamics claims the latest model is designed for real-world applications. It calls Atlas "the world’s most dynamic humanoid robot" and it certainly looks sleek and acrobatic. You might even say Boston Dynamics is known for robot stunt videos. That’s how you get 3.3 million YouTube subscribers I guess.

They were owned by Google, then Softbank, then sold to Hyundai in December, 2020 for nearly $1 Bn.