Boston Dynamics showed Atlas carrying a 23-kilogram fridge in a YouTube video
Boston Dynamics released a video on its official YouTube channel on May 18 (local time) showing humanoid robot Atlas delivering an entire refrigerator. (Photo: Boston Dynamics YouTube screenshot)
Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot ‘Atlas’ has lifted a refrigerator this time. Rather than merely lifting a heavy object, it naturally carried out the entire process of holding and moving an object with an uneven center of gravity, rotating its upper body 180 degrees, and setting it down on a table.
This is a scene showing that Atlas, which once drew attention with backflip and parkour videos, is now shifting its direction from a ‘stunt robot’ to a ‘working robot’.
Boston Dynamics released a video of Atlas transporting a small refrigerator through its official YouTube channel on May 18 (local time).
In the video, Atlas bends its knees to lift a refrigerator weighing about 23kg, then moves to a table in the back while maintaining its balance. After that, it rotates only its upper body without turning its entire body to set the refrigerator down. The video ends with a scene where a developer opens the refrigerator door, takes out a drink, and drinks it.
On the surface, it looks like a short demo, but technically, it is closer to a scene that compresses the core challenges humanoid robots must overcome to enter industrial sites. Objects in factories or logistics sites are not always placed in a fixed shape and weight. Workers feel the center of gravity of an object with their bodies, change their posture, and use not only their arms but also their waists and legs to balance.
Boston Dynamics explained that this movement was implemented through reinforcement learning-based training. Before lifting the actual refrigerator, Atlas repeatedly learned various weight, position, and friction conditions in a virtual environment. The robot was trained not just to perform under set conditions in a laboratory, but to withstand variables that occur in real environments.
What is particularly noteworthy is how much the ‘gap between simulation and reality’ has been reduced. In the robotics industry, it is not uncommon for movements that worked well in a virtual environment to shake or fail on actual hardware. This is because small differences such as floor slipperiness, sensor errors, joint reaction speed, and weight shifts inside the object accumulate.
Boston Dynamics explained that this Atlas development model is equipped with a structure to quickly train, verify, and modify based on a high-precision simulation environment. The refrigerator transport movement was also completed by going through millions of hours of parallel simulation learning and then repeatedly verifying it on the actual robot.
Atlas succeeded in transporting not only the 23kg refrigerator shown in the video, but also a refrigerator loaded with items inside, with a total weight exceeding 100 pounds, or about 45kg. It is explained that it considered situations where the weight of the internal load is not evenly distributed and can shift, rather than a simple ‘lifting of a fixed object’. This shows the possibility that robots can instead handle atypical heavy objects that require two people to lift together in manufacturing and logistics sites.
The hardware is also changing into a structure with commercialization in mind. In this generation of Atlas, only two types of actuators are used, and the structures of both arms and both legs are designed to be as identical as possible. The arms, legs, hands, and head are designed in a modular form that can be replaced within minutes on site, making part replacement easy.
This is interpreted as an advancement process taking place ahead of its deployment at Hyundai Motor Group manufacturing sites. Hyundai Motor Group announced a plan at CES 2026 in January this year to deploy Atlas to manufacturing sites starting in 2028.
Michael Herh
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