Robotics · 2026-11-10

Scooter wheels instead of legs: Boston Dynamics taught the Atlas robot to ride with AI

Boston Dynamics engineers temporarily replaced the feet of the Atlas humanoid robot with electric scooter wheels to test how AI controls its motors in real conditions.

✨ What they did

The American company Boston Dynamics, known for its robots, temporarily modified its new electric humanoid Atlas by replacing its feet with wheels. This is not preparation for a commercial product launch but a research experiment. Its goal is to test what electric motors and artificial intelligence algorithms can do in real-world conditions.

Control systems engineer Andy Wu described the experiment in the company's official blog. According to him, it was important for the engineers that the robot's motors continuously deliver high torque and speed under load. Riding on wheels with frequent starts, turns, and stops made a convenient stress test.

📌 How it works

The hardware change was simple. Engineers used only one new part: a custom adapter that attaches standard electric scooter wheels to the robot's ankle drives. Software changes were also minimal. In the computer simulation, the wheels were modeled as "ankles" that can rotate continuously.

The hardest part was closing the gap between simulation and reality. Reinforcement Learning algorithms train in millions of virtual attempts before being loaded into the physical robot. Engineers had to carefully tune the virtual motors so they matched real measurements. Otherwise, the AI would try movements the actual hardware cannot perform.

🔹 What was achieved

After the simulator was tuned, the algorithm learned how to use the wheels on its own. The training used a library of human motion capture data. According to Andy Wu, the robot even performed a 360-degree jump on the first try. Where a human would simply slide their feet during sharp maneuvers, Atlas learned to steer and drive through those sections.

Earlier this year, Boston Dynamics retired its hydraulic Atlas, known for parkour and flips, and introduced a fully electric version. The new model is lighter, quieter, and has a wider range of motion. Engineers are now integrating the motor data from the wheel experiment into the standard configuration of the bipedal robot to make it more resistant to failures and expand its capabilities.

Sources: 🔗 DOU/dev.ua