A recent 60 Minutes special on humanoid robots featured Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, a robot developed and now being tested for outside a lab at an actual Hyundai car factory.
The special showcased the massive new Hyundai Corporation manufacturing plant located outside Savannah, Georgia. The plant currently utilizes over 1,000 manufacturing robots and 1,500 human workers. That, however, could be changing.
Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics, so the integration of robots in their facilities is not a huge surprise. What may be surprising is how they plan to use them.
Hyundai is testing Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot at its car manufacturing plant in Georgia
Atlas, a 5’9″ humanoid robot that is electric-powered and weighs about 200 pounds, uses Nvidia processors to power its AI brain. The robots are trained using a VR headset, with humans remotely guiding movements. They are also taught by humans wearing motion-capture suits as they perform tasks, which are then converted into digital simulations.
Atlas can thrive in high-temperature conditions and in hazards that would be lethal to a human. It can also understand and perform the repetitive, backbreaking assembly-line tasks a manufacturing worker performs. Once replaced, that would leave humans with only the oversight, maintenance, and programming of the robots.
As for any science fiction-based concerns, Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter pushes back, saying that if it takes this much effort for Atlas to learn basic tasks, rogue robots aren’t happening anytime soon. So, while these robots are gaining “common sense” through AI, full factory integration is still years away, at least according to Playter.
