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Morning Edition · Thursday, November 12, 2026Published at 1:18 AM EST · New York
Boston Dynamics fits Atlas with scooter wheels to push its leg motors to their limits under reinforcement learning
A whole-body policy trained in MuJoCo, combined with refined motor models, carried the wheeled humanoid through sideways dashes and a 360-degree spin jump. The company says the build will not be sold.
Boston Dynamics engineers replaced the feet of the Atlas humanoid with scooter wheels. They did it to test reinforcement-learning algorithms and to probe the torque limits of the robot's actuators, the Russian-language channel AI ML Big Dat…
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Robotics Foundation Models for Embodied AI
Over the coming months, labs ship general-purpose robotics model suites that bridge vision-language understanding to physical navigation and manipulation, pushing foundation models into embodied action.
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