Boston Dynamics: What’s new, Atlas?
Boston Dynamics is an engineering and robotics design company that is best known for the development of BigDog, a quadruped robot designed for the U.S. military with funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),[1][2] and DI-Guy, software for realistic human simulation. 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 DI-Guy characters.[3]
Marc Raibert is the company’s president and project manager. He spun the company off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992.[4]
On 13 December 2013, the company was acquired by Google X (later X, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.) for an unknown price,[5] where it was managed by Andy Rubin until his departure from Google in 2014.[6] Immediately before the acquisition, Boston Dynamics transferred their DI-Guy software product line to VT MÄK, a simulation software vendor based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[7]
On 8 June 2017, Alphabet Inc. announced the sale of the company to Japan’s SoftBank Group for an undisclosed sum.[8]
