Boston Dynamics

What Boston Dynamics is

Boston Dynamics is a robotics company headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts^[1]. Its public lineup has centred on legged machines rather than wheeled platforms: when SoftBank announced its acquisition in 2017, it named BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle among the company's robots^[3]. Legged robots are difficult in a particular way — every step requires deciding where the centre of mass is, where the foot will land and whether the ground will hold, and the machine has to solve that continuously instead of following a fixed track. Much of the company's work is organised around that control problem.

Origins

The company was founded in 1992 as a spin-out of the MIT Leg Lab^[1]. Its founder, Marc Raibert, had been a professor at MIT^[2]. Starting from a academic locomotion lab and turning into a company shaped the kind of machines it built: research prototypes that walk, run and recover their balance, rather than industrial arms bolted to a floor.

The robots

Spot was the company's first commercial robot, with commercial sales beginning in June 2020^[1][5]. The company says more than 1,500 Spot robots are in customer hands^[9]. On 29 March 2021 it revealed Stretch, its first commercial robot designed specifically for warehouses^[6].

Atlas took a different route. In April 2024 the company retired the hydraulic Atlas and unveiled a fully electric Atlas^[7]. In January 2026, together with Hyundai Motor Group, it unveiled a production-ready Atlas, with deployments scheduled that year at Hyundai and at Google DeepMind^[8].

Changes of ownership

In December 2013 Google confirmed that it had acquired Boston Dynamics, its eighth robotics-company acquisition in about six months^[2]. At the time of that acquisition the company had not sold robots commercially and worked largely for Pentagon customers including DARPA^[2].

On 9 June 2017 SoftBank Group announced a definitive agreement to acquire Boston Dynamics from Alphabet Inc., with terms undisclosed^[3]. As part of the same transaction with Alphabet, SoftBank also agreed to acquire the Japanese bipedal robotics company Schaft^[3].

On 11 December 2020 Hyundai Motor Group and SoftBank agreed the main terms of a deal valuing Boston Dynamics at US$1.1 billion^[4]. Under that agreement Hyundai Motor Group would hold about 80% and SoftBank, through an affiliate, about 20%^[4]. The acquisition was completed on 21 June 2021, with Hyundai holding 80% and SoftBank retaining 20%^[5].

Where it sits

Read in order, the ownership history traces a shift in what legged robots were for. At the time of the Google acquisition the company had no commercial products and depended largely on Pentagon customers including DARPA^[2]; by the time Hyundai took control, Spot had been on sale for a year and Stretch had been announced for warehouse work^[1][5][6]. The later stage adds a manufacturing partner: a production-ready Atlas with deployments scheduled at Hyundai and Google DeepMind places the humanoid line inside industrial and AI-research settings rather than demonstrations^[8].

What has stayed constant is the type of machine. The names in the 2017 announcement — BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle — are all legged or leg-inspired designs^[3], and the two that reached commercial sale, Spot and Stretch, came out of that line^[1][5][6].