From Teleoperation to Autonomy: Inside Boston Dynamics' Atlas Training

Boston Dynamics teaches Atlas to work without a teleoperator

Funding and deals

• Serve Robotics. Acquired Phantom Auto for just under $6m to gain Voices AV low-latency video streaming for its remote robot operators watching delivery robots in real time.
• Vayu Robotics. Robotics company working on foundation models, acquired by Serve Robotics for an undisclosed sum.

Guest interviews

• Scott Kuindersma, VP of robotics research at Boston Dynamics. Kuindersma says the Spot Workshop task exercised bimanual manipulation across the workspace, and 20 hours of teleoperation data became a policy that ran autonomously. He argues large behavior models, a term coined by Toyota Research Institute, should let embodied data generalise the way language data does, unlike modular stacks that need experts for each task. He calls data the bottleneck, and says Hyundai is likely to be Boston Dynamics' biggest customer, with Atlas heading to some Hyundai facilities this year.
• Ali Kashani, CEO and co-founder of Serve Robotics. Kashani says Serve can sell its low-latency video streaming to other robotics and AV companies, and that offering teleoperation is a good way to start partnerships. Serve plans to deliver 2,000 robots this year after 400 in the first half.

News

• Zoox opens robotaxi service to the public. Amazon-owned Zoox began free public robotaxi rides on and around the Las Vegas Strip, a launch Crowe says took ten years. The four-seat vehicle has no steering wheel, and Oitzman, who rode one around CES, calls it a revolution.
• AWS shuts down RoboMaker robotics service. RoboMaker shut down on September 10, 2025 after six or seven years, and users are being pointed to AWS Batch. Crowe says it was built largely for iRobot and its 6m vacuums, and that Amazon Robotics never used it.
• Revised ISO 10218 drops collaborative robot definition. The updated standard replaces the collaborative robot definition with collaborative operation, and ANSI/RIA R15.06 was revised. Crowe says debate continues over how many cobots from leading vendors are used in collaborative applications, and he believes the number is slim.
• Uber launches route share program. Uber recently introduced a route share program that lets multiple riders share a route. Crowe raised it while the hosts debated whether Zoox's shared rides would undercut the privacy that makes Waymo attractive to riders.