Boston Dynamics opens Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia EV plant

Boston Dynamics has opened a training center for its Atlas humanoid robots at Hyundai’s EV plant near Savannah, Georgia, the company announced.

At the center, Atlas is learning to prepare and sequence auto parts for the assembly line. The robots take parts out of their shipping packaging, handle larger parts with both hands and place them in transport cubbies in the order the line needs them, according to Boston Dynamics and The Robot Report.

Pilot operations began at the site in June, Manufacturing Dive reported. Boston Dynamics said the center is now fully operational.

Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas robots across Hyundai and Kia plants over the next few years. The Georgia center is where the robots are being trained for that work. They start with parts sequencing, a repetitive job that sits between receiving and the assembly line.

The rollout is gradual. Boston Dynamics is targeting 2030 for component assembly work, about four years after training began. For manufacturers weighing a humanoid pilot, Hyundai’s plan shows which task a large automaker chose first and how long it expects to wait before the robots build cars.

Hyundai became the sole owner of Boston Dynamics this summer, when it bought SoftBank’s remaining stake.

Boston Dynamics is training Atlas with several methods, The Robot Report said. Workers operate the robot remotely while it records their movements. The robot also practices tasks in simulation and learns from people who do the job with handheld devices that record how they grip and move parts. It collects data on the plant floor as well.

So far, the company said, the work has confirmed its hardware design. “The biggest thing we’ve been finding is actually that the design assumptions we made for the production version of Atlas have been very close to right on,” Zack Jackowski, Boston Dynamics’ chief product and technology officer, told The Robot Report.

Amazon’s warehouse robots show how long it can take to scale a new type of robot. Amazon bought robot maker Kiva Systems in 2012. Its fleet reached 750,000 robots in 2024 and passed 1 million in 2025, across more than 300 facilities, according to Amazon.

By comparison, humanoids are much earlier in that curve. Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America estimate that 13,000 to 18,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025. Still, Boston Dynamics plans to build a US factory that can produce 30,000 robots a year.

The same rollout has met resistance at Hyundai’s plants in South Korea. The union there said “not a single robot can enter the workplace without labor-management agreement,” according to the Seoul Economic Daily, and later staged partial strikes. A tentative wage deal reached in August commits both sides to share information on robotics projects. The Georgia plant, however, is not unionized.

Some roboticists also doubt humanoids can take on more complex work soon. Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot, told TechCrunch that training humanoids for dexterity by showing them videos of people is “pure fantasy thinking.”

Neither company has disclosed how many Atlas robots are at the Georgia center or how their speed and error rates compare with workers.

Next year, Boston Dynamics plans to move the training center into a building about 10 times larger. It also plans to test Atlas in other industries, including logistics and food and beverage, with existing customers of its Spot and Stretch robots.

Atlas deployment on the Georgia plant floor is set to begin in 2028, Bloomberg reported.