It was reported that Hyundai Motors has spent almost USD 1 billion (RM4.06 billion) to buy Boston Dynamics—a robotics research company responsible for dynamic humanoid robot Atlas. If the robot looks familiar to you, it’s because it’s the one that does parkour on the internet.
Boston Dynamics’ YouTube channel includes a couple videos of Atlas (one seen below). Each video gained at least 11 million views.
The Boston Dynamics acquisition will become the first buyout deal for Chung Euisun as Hyundai Motor Group’s chairman since he assumed the chairmanship last October. Alongside electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell cars, Hyundai has chosen to expand on robotics as well.
According to The Korea Economic Daily, Chung said that robotics will account for 20% of its future business, with automobiles taking up half of its sales, followed by urban air mobility (UAM) at 30%. Hyundai has also said that the company will invest up to USD 9.2 billion (RM37.3 billion) in future mobility—including personal air vehicles, robotics and last-mile delivery robots—as well as existing engine vehicles.
Boston Dynamics was first acquired by Google back in 2013. Just four years later, Google sold it to the Japanese company SoftBank in 2017. SoftBank was able to turn at least one of Boston Dynamics’ creations into a commercially available product with Spot—an agile mobile robot that navigates terrain with “unprecedented mobility”. Spot went on sale for USD 74,500 (over RM300,000).
The SoftBank Group then sold Boston Dynamics to Hyundai Motor. It remains to be seen what the company’s plans are for the robotics company, but I hope it’s a whole lot more parkour videos.
[ SOURCE, 2, IMAGE SOURCE ]
