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Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video]
- hervature 10mo agoWhoever approved making a robot look like it is about to dance before awkwardly panning to a "static" model should not be making those decisions. It literally killed the vibe in the room. People went from the verge of freaking out to the biggest let down ever that it ruined whatever they said afterwards.
- LarsDu88 10mo agoNo doubt the original intent was to have the blue robot start breakdancing, but the engineering team probably said it wasn't ready on time Sometimes, demos are just not ready on time. It's a reality of life. Not every company throws baseballs at their Cybertruck windows onstage.
- hervature 10mo agoIf that's the case, just scrap the demo. They literally kept the script "let us show you what it looks like".
- Tempest1981 10mo agoOr at least have it serve bags of popcorn.
- pests 10mo agoand they did
- LarsDu88 10mo agoWell they did show us what it looked like. And a physical model is better than a CG render
- BloodyIron 10mo agoDisagree, it was a good transition to a second example. It didn't kill it for me at all.
- krisoft 10mo agoDisagree, it was a bad move in two different ways. It was anticlimactic emotionaly and it didn’t convey the right message rationaly either. Anticlimax because the first robot hyped up the entrance of the second robot. It was emotionaly conveying that “hey you think these groovy movements are great? Check out this guy.” But once it become clear that the next guy is just a dumb statue it deflated. How lively the first one was made the second one that much worse in context. A step back. That is the emotional fail. But perhaps you don’t care about that. Think about what additional message the stage presence of the second robot conveys. The first robot estabilished that they can make a smooth robot. They drove home that the robot is usually autonomous, but in any way it is not pupetted by a guy in a motion tracking suit. The presentation covered how the robots will be used, who will be the first pilot costumer, how will it be introduced and how will it be manufactured. These are all great answers to a concern someone from the audience might have. But what is the concern to which the second robot is the answer for? Did you doubt even for a second their ability to make the same robot you can already see on the stage but in blue? Because i didn’t. Not before they shown the static demonstration. If they just said “we are working on a production optimised, and streamlined v2” i would have totaly accepted that they can do it. The only message the second non-working robot communicates is that they are having trouble with their production model. They couldn’t even make it stand in one spot and wave politely! Something is cooked with it and badly. It adds nothing positive to the message of the presentation while introduces the very visible sign that something is wrong. Now, do I think they won’t be able to solve the problems eventually? Of course not. Heck maybe it will be up and running within days. But why show something which is not working? It is such an unforced error. The first robot could have just done the dance then pointed at the screen and then walked out and nothing would have been less about the whole presentation.
- thecopy 10mo agoIm sorry, but this is just too much. This is an industrial product. Decisions will not be made based on emotions from a demo at CES.
- refulgentis 10mo agoThis may be a bit overwrought, I’m on my 3rd watch and can’t identify the moment where breakdancing could be expected, my best guess is when it does a tai chi position at 3m20s, which seems unlikely but perhaps on the nose if you’re western, young, not a dancer, and don’t know breakdancing well, i.e. as a series of static positions moved through slowly.
- renewiltord 10mo agoWhat they are stating is: # Initial robot tai-chis towards the right of the video # This is a stage act that "cues up" the second robot # One can expect that this "ta-da" moment will have the presented robot do something # Instead, the presented robot stands there doing nothing # We have statues that are hundreds of years old easily accessible. Hence a new statue is not interesting
- alejo 10mo agoMaybe folks where still confused by memories of the Australian breakdancer from last summer olympics (?)
- refulgentis 10mo agoThis was excellent comedy, and I never say that, kudos
- arathis 10mo agoWhat the fuck are you people on about
- krisoft 10mo agoThe second robot is broken. It is not moving. Why show a broken robot? That is what we are on about.
- ofrzeta 10mo agoReally .. it was a bit anticlimatic. "We've developed the new Atlas. It's so great bla bla. We wanted to show it but now we don't" -- /switches off TV
- rasz 10mo agoreal kicker was >"We just couldn't pry the actual production samples out of our engineers hands at the lab this week. " sounds like "Our CEO ordered samples to be shipped but those pesky engineers just wouldnt do it guys!" >"Um, so we're going to be showing you videos" Except they didnt even show videos, just some bad CGI aka "We rented this huge ass auditorium to show you our pet. Golden elephant is currently in our basement, he is tired right now so instead look at all those cool drawings my nephew made"!
- mxschumacher 10mo agothat's a very impressive demo, I have never seen a robot move so smoothly before.
- Tempest1981 10mo agoFun to watch the joints reverse in unnatural ways.
- diamond559 10mo agoWhy does it needs bipedal legs on a flat factory floor, does it need them to walk up the bus steps it takes to get to it's second story walk up apartment where it lives w/ its robot family?
- lifetimerubyist 10mo agoThe end goal is to have these things be general purpose do all sorts of jobs everywhere. Civilization is designed around human anatomy, so if you want to replace humans with a drop-in robot replacement in as many places as fast as possible then a humanoid robot is how you’re going to do it. It’s also probably more cost effective to design 1 robot that does everything, than design 1 robot specialized for 1 task. Specialized robots will fill in gaps, but humanoids will be the vast majority of the AI-based robot workforce.
- rg0ne 10mo agoThis, and ease of transition. I imagine if you're buying a robot for a factory/complex/rig/jobsite, you would want one that can access anywhere a human can. You can't just rebuild a factory for a couple robots
- diamond559 10mo agoDoes the robot need to eat its robot lunch in the breakroom and share some robot memes w/ its robot bros? We already have robotics in factories, when they are more efficient than humans the factories are retrofitted or rebuilt around the new machines.
- MagicMoonlight 10mo agoBut not everyone is Amazon. A small business isn’t going to rebuild their leased building, but they’d happily pay 50k for a robot.
- diamond559 10mo agoWhy does Hyundai need "general purpose" bots, do they want to create a robot civilization? They don't need a robot to "do everything", they need robots to efficiently make cars. What do you even mean "do everything? Does it need to take the bus home and make love to its robot wife, walk its robot dog around the block? It doesn't need legs, you have drunk the koolaid, snap out of it. AGI isn't around the corner and your fantasy robot world isn't real.
- anonzzzies 10mo agoWhat will it cost though? They keep talking industrial, I guess it will be very expensive. You would hope that a company like Hyundai can mass produce these things for a sane price really.
- Tempest1981 10mo ago> will be very expensive Expensive compared to other industrial robots? Maybe wait for a consumer version... without 56 DoF. Although who knows what kind of laundry folding might be possible with 56 degrees of freedom, and fully rotating joints!
- anonzzzies 10mo agoJust curious about the price of these once the roll of the line. I would pay 150k for it today, not 500k. So I wonder if I will have one next year or not. And for now; who knows if it can fold laundry, literally the only demos we get is dancing and marial arts, 2 things I could not care less about. I want my house painted in whatever hot weather (painters don't work in the summer here because too hot), laundry picked up, stairs cleaned etc. I don't need a 100k robot doing Korean dances. But I think this 56 DoF might be more interesting than whatever the consumer product will be, as the consumer products seem to be vastly worse even than the industrial ones and both had 'sketchy' demos of doing very simple tasks (slow, parkinson like, many takes, often with someone controlling it with vr glasses and controller).
- garciasn 10mo agoMany outlets are quoting Morgan Stanley analysts suggesting they’ll start at $150K. Here is a non-paywalled article that has some info about the MS claim: https://www.automotivemanufacturingsolutions.com/automation/hyundai-prepares-humanoid-robots-for-vehicle-production/2582616 https://www.automotivemanufacturingsolutions.com/automation/... From the article: Hyundai aims not only to use humanoid robotics but also to scale it industrially. The company plans to build a production system with a capacity of up to 30,000 robots per year. Analysts at Morgan Stanley Research predict the market for humanoid robotics to reach a volume of around five trillion US dollars by the year 2050. For the period around 2028, when Hyundai plans to start scalable production, a unit price of about 150,000 US dollars is expected.
- kingstnap 10mo agoIt looks cool, I'm wondering about the hands though. Human hands have a ton of dexterity and Atlas looks like it might be pretty fat fingered.
- trebligdivad 10mo agoThe new leg design is interesting - it's quite a change to have one segment out of line with the others; and unlike any natural leg ??
- 01100011 10mo agoTough week for Tesla. Nvidia is about to ship a competitive self-driving solution and Hyundai is putting a useful humanoid robot into production. What claim will Elon make next to defend the stock price?
- refulgentis 10mo agoDoesn’t matter :/ been on this for 6 long years, and nothing ever matters.
- jbullock35 10mo agoI think that you're just off on timing. The previous poster didn't mention the even worse news for Tesla: its sales declined for the second straight year, and it's no longer the leading manufacturer of electric cars. (BYD is.)
- refulgentis 10mo agoI hope you’re right and I also am near-certain you will be in my shoes definitely in 2 years, maybe 3. Here’s hoping that won’t be the case. (My pessimistic take is this will have ~0 effect due to retail still being in it for FSD (via cyber cab) and the robot)
- Animats 10mo agoThere are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have Youtube videos of them moving around. Some are far more agile than this one. Needs more manipulation. Such elaborate fingers and all it does is mime carrying a box. There are some brief material handling demos at the end, but nothing challenging. There's been considerable progress in robot manipulation in the past year, after many decades of very slow progress. This year's new manipulation demos have been for fixed base robot hands. Robot manipulation still isn't good enough for Amazon's bin picking. The best demo of 2025 is two robot hands opening a padlock with a key, with one hand holding the lock while the other uses the key. We'll probably see this start to come together in 2026.
- BloodyIron 10mo agoNeat!
- TowerTall 10mo ago[flagged]
- naryJane 10mo agoI was wondering the same thing about bio-tech years ago and never found one I trusted. Recently learned about “investment themes” offered by Charles Schwab, and I was actually impressed with their offerings and the ability to tailor your picks & percentages in a given “theme.”
- thomassmith65 10mo agoThe only robotics ETFs available to the public are full of the usual dross like Nvidia and Tesla. If your broker gives you access to the South Korea Stock Exchange, Hyundai's ticker is 005380.KS - I believe they own Boston Dynamics, so that gives you credible exposure to robotics.
- matthewaveryusa 10mo agoHyundai is already up 13%. I had no clue that CES annoucements could drive stock price this much!
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> If your broker gives you access to the South Korea Stock Exchange There are a few ADRs if you don’t. HYUD and HYMLF come to mind. (Owning Korean stocks is a pain.)
- intrasight 10mo agoCan't help but thinking of hotdog fingers scene in "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
- SamuelAdams 10mo agoI wonder if this will cause new legislation to be created, and new government bodies like the FDA. If this becomes available to many homes, what is to stop a hacker from programming this humanoid to kill its owners?
- callc 10mo agoMurder is still murder. Whether it’s done in person or through a screen. IANAL.. I know current US computer crime laws are extremely broad and ill-defined. Curious to hear opinion from someone who actually knows some law.
- TheDong 10mo ago> what is to stop a hacker from programming this humanoid to kill its owners? What's to stop a hacker from hacking into the tesla update server and pushing an update that causes all teslas to max accelerate right off bridges? I wonder if over-the-air updates for cars will cause new legislation and a new regulatory body making it illegal to push a murder-update to cars, cause otherwise someone will surely do that. It's neither that easy to "just hack anything", nor does the world have skilled malicious people that want to commit murder, if only they could do it through hacking instead of with a gun. Like, this fear-mongering about "what if the hackers turn this into a weapon" seems like such a silly worry in a country where anyone can trivially acquire a gun and a bump-stock, or a car, or a drone and materials for a bomb. Or a canister of gasoline and a pack of matches.
- MohskiBroskiAI 10mo ago[flagged]
- kibwen 10mo ago> It’s a tool. Let’s stop judging it like it’s supposed to be one of us. Tech CEOs and their breathless AI hype have demonstrated to everyone how dreadfully effective it is to weaponize anthropomorphization and pareidolia.
- MohskiBroskiAI 10mo ago[flagged]
- cadamsdotcom 10mo ago> Read my paper By the time someone does it’s too late. Even the few who do read about anthropomorphization still have to override their subconscious reaction. We’re all human after all.. The market may yet settle on a different form factor that won’t trigger the ick. Flat tabletop with robot legs??
- MohskiBroskiAI 10mo ago[flagged]
- zoklet-enjoyer 10mo agoI always upvote microtubules in the brain acting as an antenna for consciousness. Or something like that
- hettygreen 10mo ago"It can totally control itself, but we're gonna have a human control it" also "the next version is totally ready, but here's a full-size model"
- AlotOfReading 10mo agoEver been involved with a demo, especially at an event the size of CES? I'd also choose a human controller. Frankly, the fact that they were honest and wrote it into the script is a positive indication.
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo agoI am used to thinking of robots having to be physically isolated from the squishy humans. Probably a reasonable safety precaution for what is a gen 0.8 model to not have an opportunity to run amuck while being filmed.
- metadat 10mo agoInteresting the Atlas robot can only operate from -4 to 104⁰ F. That upper limit is pretty weak, I wonder what starts to break or not work properly at 110⁰ F?
- MathMonkeyMan 10mo agoNo idea, but probably electronics overheating. Need to get to work on that robot blood stat!
- krisoft 10mo ago> I wonder what starts to break or not work properly at 110⁰ F? Most likely the cooling of the actuator motors. You need to keep the magnets in the motors under their curie point or they stop being magnets. At the same time the coils right next to the magnets are heated by the electricity going through them.
- MohskiBroskiAI 10mo ago[flagged]
- buu700 10mo agoThis is exactly what I've been waiting for since Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics. Super exciting news. I also wish Tesla and Figure all the best, of course. More competition in this space will ultimately benefit all of us.
- LarsDu88 10mo agoI didn't find it boring. You didn't think how it could Exocist spin it's head 360 degrees and unpack itself like a contortionist cool?
- qcnguy 10mo ago> Tesla is shipping Optimus Sub-Primes. Hyundai is shipping a boring, reliable, high-torque worker. I’ll take the boring static model that actually has a spec sheet over another backflip video any day. We don't actually know how boring or reliable it is. But the key here is really the mind. Atlas looks strictly worse for a given task than any other kind of robot. Its only advantage is the touted lower training costs. It's very unclear how that really measures up. You can see a robot do cool stuff on stage and imagine it must be great, but the only thing that really matters for manufacturing is whether they can lower the training cost for new tasks to much less than what other static non-humanoid robot manufacturers make. There it seems dubious. They only seem to talk about and demonstrate one task, engine part sequencing. It appears to be just a pick and place task. It's not obvious why existing robots can't do it well. They make general claims about how it's often not worth automating a task, because it changes too quickly or it costs too much to program a robot. Sure. But that's a statement about the quality of AI not the form of the robot. Existing pick place machines work great and can handle messy real world noise like objects being in random positions and places. They are much, much faster than a humanoid robot will be, and much cheaper. So what's Atlas' advantage on the factory floor? https://www.fanucamerica.com/solutions/applications/picking-and-packaging-robots https://www.fanucamerica.com/solutions/applications/picking-...
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoRelated: Boston Dynamics and DeepMind form new AI partnership https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504966
- yalogin 10mo agoWonder how much this would cost out the door. If figure’s optimistic target is 150k per robot after mass manufacturing. This level of dexterity is only needed for personal robots. I would love this to be sub 10k
- megaman821 10mo agoThe robot companies are all get closer, but I don't think a humanoid robot will do anything at a cheaper cost than an actual human in 2026. It definitely looks like there is a path though.
- Geste 10mo ago...We are going to have to fight against it at some point, will we ?
- ironbound 10mo agoBattery factory's in china are using wheeled robots. https://cnevpost.com/2025/12/18/catl-launches-humanoid-robot-powered-battery-pack-line/ https://cnevpost.com/2025/12/18/catl-launches-humanoid-robot...
- ofrzeta 10mo agoMakes much more sense, right? In factory it's so much easier to control the environment (flat floors etc.) than to develop the ever next-generation robot that can cope with all situations. Also I don't know what that battery-assembling is a humanoid anyway.
- imtringued 10mo agoWhen people say "humanoid robots are designed for human work spaces" 95% of the time they mean the counter/table is at adult human height, the other 5% of the time they mean the robot has to climb stairs.
- t1234s 10mo agoWill the winner in the humanoid robot game be the one that develops the most human like hands? A good test would be a robot that can thread a needle and sew on a button.
- imtringued 10mo agoThreading a needle has already been done with regular robot arms.
- cmckn 10mo agoThe way it stands up is so cursed but I find its face really charming.
- HAL3000 10mo agoThis is real world footage ("60 Minutes" material, video from yesterday), non choreographed Boston Dynamics robots from Hyundai factory: https://youtu.be/CbHeh7qwils?t=437 https://youtu.be/CbHeh7qwils?t=437
- nialv7 10mo agoThat's not the new Atlas they are announcing.
- ram_rattle 10mo agoI still believe it was a very bad idea that google sold of BD
- MagicMoonlight 10mo agoI wonder how easy it is to control. Like does someone have to spend 6 months in a lab programming each movement, or could you have it doing a new task by the end of the day? It would be cool to have one at home as a little helper some day.
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo agoThe video running behind the speaker at the absolute start looked familiar. So I looked it up and it seems Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics now.
- nialv7 10mo agoIt's interesting so far we have not seen the new Atlas actually functioning. In the past Boston Dynamics announcements have always been done with real hardware. But this time it's only with models and CGI. What happened?
- qcnguy 10mo agoYeah they say "we couldn't pry the model out of our engineer's hands" which is obviously nonsense. What they mean is that it doesn't work yet.
- cs702 10mo agoVery cool. On one hand, this is great. It portends that all of us will benefit from intense price-and-feature competition between Hyundai, Tesla, and others. On the other hand, Ironman 2's Hammer Drones no longer seem so far off: https://youtu.be/Ryth87k2Mww?t=78 https://youtu.be/Ryth87k2Mww?t=78 and Robocop doesn't seem so far-off either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECemP5fi_n0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECemP5fi_n0 We sure live in interesting times.
- trenning 10mo agoThis robot is going to put all the children out of work at the Hyundai factory in Georgia. Or maybe their child labor augments the robot for tight to reach areas?