Humanoid all-purpose robot: Boston Dynamics and Toyota cooperate

Robotics company Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) have entered into a research partnership to advance the development of a general-purpose humanoid robot that can be used universally. This was announced by Toyota on Wednesday. Under the terms of the cooperation, Boston Dynamics will provide the latest humanoid robot platform Atlas as hardware. TRI, on the other hand, is to contribute its Large Behavior Model (LBM) for robots. Both are to be further developed together.

In the project, Boston Dynamics and TRI want to contribute their respective strengths in order to make faster progress in the development of a general-purpose robot than has previously been the case individually. Many complex challenges in the development of a "useful" humanoid robot can only be overcome together. According to the two partners, a lot of research and development work needs to be done to achieve this.

Boston Dynamics is contributing the electric version of the humanoid robot Atlas as the basic platform. It is extremely mobile, can manipulate objects and has a number of extraordinary physical properties. This makes it the ideal hardware for implementing the artificial intelligence techniques developed by TRI. The aim is to fundamentally improve the robot's manipulation capabilities and whole-body behavior.

Further development of LBMs

Specifically, Boston Dynamics and the TRI are planning the further development of LBMs for robotics. Generative AI will contribute to improving the robot's dexterity and capabilities. Research into object recognition and the training of large language models (LLMs) will be used to develop multitasking, image processing and language-conditioned basic models for skillful manipulation.

Data for the further development of LBMs will also come from the robot itself. Teleoperations and programmatic control will be used to teach the robot a number of new tasks. The data collected in the process will in turn be used to support the training of LBMs. Simulations would also be used. The aim is to teach the robot new robust whole-body skills more quickly using pre-trained models.

The team, which is jointly led by Scott Kuindersma, Senior Director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics and Russ Tedrake, Vice President of Robotics Research at TRI, will also answer other research questions. These include basic training questions for humanoid robots, questions relating to full-body sensor technology, human-machine interaction and safety.

(olb)