US robotics firm Boston Dynamics announced this week it is joining forces with Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a subsidiary of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corporation, with the aim of accelerating the development of general-purpose humanoid robots. The partnership will combine two of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics companies, making use of TRI’s Large Behavior Models and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot.

Boston Dynamics, majority owned by Toyota Motor’s rival Hyundai Motor Corporation, is known for its humanoids with capabilities “from extreme mobility to bimanual manipulation”. The company said its “latest generation of Atlas robot is the result of years of hardware/software co-design aimed at building the most capable humanoid platform, both in terms of physical capability and software interfaces for authoring whole-body behaviors. This makes it an ideal platform for advancing the science of AI-based manipulation skills.”

TRI is seen as a world leader in the rapid advancement of Large Behavior Models (LBMs) for robotics. Its research includes “groundbreaking work on diffusion policy, which pioneered the successful application of generative AI to advance dexterous manipulation capabilities in robotics. TRI has also played a leading role in the development of open-source robot AI models and datasets. Leveraging additional strength in computer vision and large-language model training, TRI’s work on LBMs aims to achieve multi-task, vision-and-language-conditioned foundation models for dexterous manipulation.”

Boston Dynamics’s CEO Robert Playter said in a statement: “There has never been a more exciting time for the robotics industry, and we look forward to working with TRI to accelerate the development of general-purpose humanoids. This partnership is an example of two companies with a strong research-and-development foundation coming together to work on many complex challenges and build useful robots that solve real-world problems.”

Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist and CEO of TRI said: “Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning hold tremendous potential for advancing physical intelligence. The opportunity to implement TRI’s state-of-the-art AI technology on Boston Dynamics’ hardware is game-changing for each of our organizations as we work to amplify people and improve quality of life.”

Boston Dynamics said its collaboration with TRI is designed to leverage physical capabilities of the new electric Atlas robot combined with “the ability to programmatically command and teleoperate a broad range of whole-body bimanual manipulation behaviors, will allow research teams to deploy the robot across a range of tasks and collect data on its performance. This data will, in turn, be used to support the training of advanced LBMs, utilizing rigorous hardware and simulation evaluation to demonstrate that large, pre-trained models can enable the rapid acquisition of new robust, dexterous, whole-body skills.”

The joint team will also conduct research to answer fundamental training questions for humanoid robots, the ability of research models to leverage whole-body sensing, and understanding human-robot interaction and safety/assurance cases to support these new capabilities.