Boston Dynamics joins hands with Toyota in AI humanoid research

(GD Net Korea = Reporter Shin Young-bin) Boston Dynamics announced on the 16th that it will form a partnership with Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and begin joint research on artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

The two organizations plan to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoid robots by using Toyota Research Institute’s Large Behavioral Model (LBM) with Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot.

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

The research team demonstrates the physical performance of a new electric atlas robot and its ability to programmatically command and remotely operate a wide range of full-body bimanual movements. Through this, we plan to deploy robots in various tasks and collect robot performance data.

Boston Dynamics electric humanoid robot ‘Atlas’ (Photo = Boston Dynamics)

The data is used to enable large-scale pre-trained models to quickly learn new systemic skills through hardware and simulation evaluations, and to support training of advanced LBMs.

The joint research team also conducts research to understand ▲ basic training issues for humanoid robots ▲ the ability of research models to utilize full body sensing ▲ human-robot interaction (HRI) and safety/assurance cases to support new functions. .

“There has never been a more exciting time for the robotics industry, and we look forward to collaborating with TRI to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoids,” said Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Plater. “This will be an example of creating a useful robot that solves problems,” he said.

“Recent advances in AI and machine learning have enormous potential to advance physical intelligence,” said Gill Pratt, Toyota Chief Scientist and CEO of Toyota Research Institute. “It will bring change,” he said.

Boston Dynamics is an American robot company acquired by Hyundai Motor Company in 2020. It was founded in 1992 by Dr. Mark Raibert, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We created the bipedal robot ‘Atlas’ and ‘Petman’, and officially commercialized the quadrupedal robot ‘Spot’ in 2020.

Toyota Research Institute conducts research to amplify human capabilities and focuses on making everyday life safer and more sustainable. We are developing technologies to advance energy and materials, human-centered artificial intelligence, human interactive driving, and robotics technologies.

Toyota Research Institute is known as the world leader in LBM for robotics. Generative AI has been actively applied to develop agile manipulation capabilities in robotics. We have also worked on developing open source robot AI models and data sets.

Reporter Shin Young-bin ([email protected])