When Hyundai first bought the robot company Boston Dynamics in 2021, It made it clear that it intended to be an early leader in robotics and promised the company would explore ways of using robotic to help improve productivity and safety.

After years of testing as well as a few years of making Atlas show off its dace moves, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics revealed the production version of the Atlas humanoid robot while also confirming they will begin deploying Atlas to factories in 2028.

The final version of a long-running experiment

During its conference at CES 2026, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics revealed that the final versions of the robot are being built now and even showed off a static prototype of the updated Atlas humanoid alog with its existing Spot robot dogs.

This final enterprise version of Atlas “can perform a wide array of industrial tasks,” according to Boston Dynamics, and is specifically designed with consistency and reliability in mind. While the company’s existing research prototype provided a demonstration of its movement capability, this new robot promises to benefit from multiple improvements.

This includes a sharper 360-degree camera system, fully rotational joints, and human scale hands with tactile sensors for fine motor operations. It’s far from a toy though, with this water resistant humanoid not only being able to withstand extreme heat or cold, but it also has the ability to lift up to 110 lbs and reach up to 7.5 feet for elevated items.

The figurative secret sauce though is how integrated it is with AI thanks to a newly minted agreement with Google to use its DeepMind technology. The Atlas robot not only has the ability to make its way back to its charging station if its battery packs run low after four hours of work and swap its batteries out, but can also communicate skills it learned to other Atlas units using AI.

Georgia deployment key test

Hyundai revealed it will begin using Atlas in its car factories in 2028 with Hyundai’s facility in Georgia being one of the first facilities to use them. At first, the robots will be used for more mundane tasks like parts sequencing but the two companies hope Atlas can eventually expand its presence into other roles.

Some of these later assignments could include component assembly work, repetitive tasks, and instances where heavy lifting is required. It remains to be seen how this will go over with labor unions who might see the appearance of these robots as potential threats to job security for their workers while legislators might also have issue with these plans.

Despite the hurdles, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics are confident that Atlas will be helpful to workers and play a role in increasing industrial automation moving forward.