Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) are teaming up to accelerate the creation of a universally applicable humanoid robot. Announced by Toyota, this partnership will leverage the latest humanoid robot platform, Atlas, from Boston Dynamics as the hardware component. Meanwhile, TRI will provide its advanced Large Behaviour Model (LBM) to enhance the robot's capabilities further.

Advancing Humanoid Robotics

The collaboration aims to harness the companies' individual strengths to make quicker progress in developing a versatile humanoid robot. The challenges involved in creating a 'useful' humanoid robotic solution are numerous and can only be tackled effectively through joint effort. Both partners acknowledge that substantial research and development work is needed to achieve their ambitious goals.

Boston Dynamics has contributed its robust humanoid robot Atlas, which is known for its exceptional mobility, object manipulation abilities, and a range of impressive physical characteristics. This makes Atlas the perfect foundation to incorporate the artificial intelligence techniques developed by TRI. The primary objective is to significantly enhance the robot's manipulation skills and full-body behavior.

Enhancements through AI

Boston Dynamics and TRI plan to further develop LBMs specifically for robotics applications. They envision generative AI playing a critical role in refining the robot's dexterity and capabilities. By researching object recognition and training Large Language Models (LLMs), the team seeks to develop fundamental models for multitasking, image processing, and language-conditioned manipulations.

Data for LBM enhancement will not only come from traditional research methods but will also be gathered directly from the robot itself. Through teleoperations and programmatic control, the robot is expected to learn new tasks. This data will be instrumental in training the LBMs. Simulations will also be utilized to expedite the robot's acquisition of new, robust full-body abilities through pre-trained models.

The joint team, led by Scott Kuindersma, Senior Director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics, and Russ Tedrake, Vice President of Robotics Research at TRI, will address additional research questions. These include fundamental training queries for humanoid robots, full-body sensor integration, human-machine interaction, and safety concerns.

This update on the collaboration between Boston Dynamics and Toyota was initially reported by Heise Online.