Boston Dynamics is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Group since December 2020, but having only completed the acquisition in June 2021.[1]

Boston Dynamics develops of a series of dynamic highly mobile robots, including BigDog, Spot, Atlas, and Handle. Since 2019, Spot has been made commercially available, making it the first commercially available robot from Boston Dynamics, while the company has stated its intent to commercialize other robots as well, including Handle.

History
The company was founded by Marc Raibert, who spun the company off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992.[2] The company was an outgrowth of the Leg Laboratory, Raibert's research lab at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. The Leg Laboratory helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots. These robots were inspired by the remarkable ability of animals to move with agility, dexterity, perception and intelligence, and the work there set the stage for the robots developed at Boston Dynamics.[3] Nancy Cornelius was a co-founder of Boston Dynamics, having joined the company as its first employee. During her time there she served as an officer of the company, did engineering on many contracts, was CFO for 10 years, and later was VP in charge of engineering on several contracts. She retired after 21 years of service in 2013, when the company was acquired by Google.[4] Robert Playter was also a co-founder of the company, joining a few months later, as soon as he completed his PhD thesis at MIT working with Raibert in the Leg Laboratory. Playter was COO at the company for many years and has been CEO since 2019.[5]

Early in the company's history, it worked with the American Systems Corporation under a contract from the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (NAWCTSD) to replace naval training videos for aircraft launch operations with interactive 3D computer simulations featuring characters made with DI-Guy, software for realistic human simulation.[6] Eventually the company started making physical robots—for example, BigDog was a quadruped robot designed for the U.S. military with funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).[7][8]

On December 13, 2013, the company was acquired by Google X (later X, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.) for an unknown price,[9] where it was managed by Andy Rubin until his departure from Google in 2014.[10] Immediately before the acquisition, Boston Dynamics transferred their DI-Guy software product line to VT MÄK, a simulation software vendor based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[11]

On June 8, 2017, Alphabet Inc. announced the sale of the company to Japan's SoftBank Group for an undisclosed sum.[12] On April 2, 2019, Boston Dynamics acquired the Silicon Valley startup Kinema Systems.[13]

In December 2020, Hyundai Motor Group acquired an 80% stake in the company from SoftBank for approximately $880 million dollars.[14] SoftBank Group retains about 20% through an affiliate.[15] In June 2021, it was announced that Hyundai officially took a controlling stake in the company from SoftBank.[16]

In October 2022, the company signed a pledge saying it would not support any weaponization of its robotic creations. Boston Dynamics offered other robotics companies to join the pledge with 5 other firms signing as well.[17]