In July 2013, DARPA publicly unveiled Atlas, a humanoid robot developed for the agency by Boston Dynamics. On July 8, 2013, the seven teams that had advanced from DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge gathered at Boston Dynamics in Waltham, Massachusetts to meet the machine they would program for the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials.
DARPA described the original Atlas as six-foot-two and 330 pounds, with 28 hydraulically actuated joints, two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head packed with sensors and an onboard control computer. It came with two sets of hands, one from iRobot and one from Sandia National Labs. A tether supplied power and a connection to a human operator. DARPA called it “one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever built, but essentially a physical shell for the software brains and nerves that the teams will continue to develop and refine.”
The point of Atlas was disaster response: program manager Gill Pratt explained that teams would learn whether their “simulation-honed algorithms can run a real machine in real environments,” performing tasks like opening doors, turning valves, and clearing debris that might be needed after a catastrophe such as the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Atlas was the public face of Boston Dynamics, a company founded in 1992 when Marc Raibert spun it out of the MIT Leg Lab. Over the following decade, increasingly capable and acrobatic Atlas videos made the robot one of the most recognizable symbols of modern robotics.