Training center at the automotive plant: Atlas practices at Hyundai, 25,000 colleagues to follow

On September 21, Boston Dynamics opened a training center for robots near Savannah, Georgia, right in the middle of Hyundai's operating plant. The humanoid Atlas learns there with real automotive parts, unpacking boxes and sorting components for assembly into compartments. In 2027, the center will move to a building ten times larger. The training staff is not revealing how large the staff is today.

The training has a clear goal: Hyundai wants to deploy 25,000 Atlas robots in its own factories. What's noteworthy is the location. Georgia has no union, while in Korea in July, 35,000 Hyundai employees struck against precisely these robots. They are demanding veto rights before the first Atlas enters a Korean plant.

Boston Dynamics calls the facility a factory for robot behavior. Real parts, real work cells, plus people who remote-control Atlas or demonstrate motions with hand-guided grippers, while training continues in parallel in the simulator. What comes off the line here are not cars, but training data. That sounds unspectacular, but it is exactly what humanoids are most lacking today.

The training plan is ambitious. In the summer, there was talk of the first deployment in Georgia starting in 2028, but now Atlas will be in the plant two years earlier, albeit initially in training and not yet in operation. Assembly work is to follow by 2030, and Hyundai is planning its own production facility in the United States for 30,000 robots per year. The fact that no one is saying how many Atlas robots are already training fits the picture: whoever doesn't name a figure today won't have to measure up to one tomorrow.

For the competition, this is uncomfortable. Figure is learning at BMW, Agility with logistics customers, and Hexagon is gathering experience for its AEON developed in Zurich at Schaeffler's pilot plants. They are all guests in other people's facilities. Atlas, on the other hand, has the key to its own house, since Hyundai took over the remaining stake in Boston Dynamics in July.

There is also a Swiss subplot. Three days before the opening, it became known that SoftBank is taking over the Robotics and AI Institute, which originated from the Boston Dynamics environment and operates a laboratory at Zurich Oerlikon under ETH Professor Marco Hutter. Basic research is moving on, practice is moving into the factory. But it will likely take several more training seasons before an Atlas is sorting vials in a Swiss pharmaceutical or watch manufacturing facility.