- Boston Dynamics Atlas can deliver a drink
- It also delivers the fridge because it can lift up to 110 lbs.
- We also get an insight into how they train Atlas Products’ humanoid robots
Atlas delivers a drink in much the same way the Hulk might: forget the can, bring the fridge. In a new video demo, we finally get a good look at what the all-new Atlas Product humanoid robot can do, and it’s sure to be eye-opening.
When I last saw the Atlas product at CES 2026, it was standing still while the all-electric Atlas prototype moved boxes and folded itself almost accordion-style. However, the updated product has even more impressive movements, especially since no part of its body seems to be limited by typical human-level flexibility.
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Where you might be able to rotate your torso, at most 90 degrees, Atlas can turn his upper body a full 360 degrees, a skill that proves quite useful for delivering a cold drink. The new robot, according to a Boston Dynamics release delivered in January, has 56 degrees of freedom, can replace its own battery and lift up to 110 pounds.
Boston Dynamics actually provided two videos on Monday (May 18), and while one of the Atlas Product robot lifting a refrigerator and delivering it to a lab technician to fetch a cold drink is fun to watch, it’s the second deep-dive video about how Boston Dynamics is training Atlas and why they chose to demonstrate its skills in this slightly comical way.
Atlas practices … a lot
Unlike many other humanoid robots, Atlas’ first job will not be in the home, and much of the development work has been in the service of delivering a system that is cheap, simple, reliable and can easily slide into a production role. Perhaps this is why, while Altas resembles the human form, it is far smaller than, say, Neo Bot, Telsa Optimus, or Figure 03 from Figure AI. However, you could argue that its design makes the Atlas faster, more agile and perhaps far more ready to deliver a heavy package from Spot A to Spot B.
In the video, Atlas lifts an unplugged, 50LB mini-fridge and carries it over to a table, where it gently sets it down before stepping aside and watching the researcher retrieve a canned beverage. 50lbs is significant, but the researchers noted that in lab tests they got the Atlas to lift 100lbs effortlessly. In both cases the goal was some human-like effort. “A tool that’s fundamentally human-like, which means it has to start interacting with objects. And objects come in all shapes and forms,” says Boston Dynamics Atlas Research Engineer Vinay Kamidi.
Atlas doesn’t just lift the fridge. “Put your whole body into it, that was kind of the idea,” notes Boston Dynamics Atlas Controls Associate Director Benjamin Stephens.
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Getting Atlas to perform this skill without mishap is the result of long-term, visualized training. The researchers start with an animation of the task and then run in the computer “millions of hours” of simulations in which the robot practices lifting, carrying and placing the refrigerator.
When they ran the program on the real Atlas hardware, it did the job perfectly.
It’s funny to think that a robot that can perform a backflip that relatively few humans can do takes millions of simulated attempts to learn a task that a human can master in an instant. However, AI is speeding up the simulation process, and Boston Dynamics researchers are not only excited about its current beverage delivery capabilities, but also about what the future holds.
“We haven’t seen the limits of what Atlas can do,” says Atlas software engineer Shane Rozen-Levy in the video, and the future is “only limited by our imaginations.”
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