Atlas swaps its feet for wheels and lands a 360-degree jump on try one

Picture a warehouse full of stacked boxes. A humanoid robot glides between them on scooter wheels, turns like a figure skater, then jumps, spins once in the air and lands softly.

That's the new video from Boston Dynamics, the robotics company owned by Hyundai Motor Group. It released the clip on November 9 (local time), and it stars Atlas with wheels where its feet used to be.

What happened?

Besides the 360-degree jump, the video shows Atlas balancing on a single wheel with one leg lifted. It also pushes itself up from the floor and speeds off forward.

The point: the robot can keep control of its whole body even when the way its wheels touch the ground keeps changing.

Why wheels?

This wheeled Atlas is a research platform, and Hyundai says there are no plans to sell it. The team wanted to test its motors and whole-body control in different conditions.

Wheeled driving is a tough test. During starting, turning and stopping, the motors have to carry real weight while delivering high torque and speed. "The key is testing the actuators to their limits," said Andy Wu, an Atlas control engineer, in the video.

How did it nail the jump?

The team used reinforcement learning, where a robot practises moves again and again in simulation. The hard part is making the virtual world match the real hardware.

So the engineers modelled the motors' behaviour precisely, then moved the learned skills onto the real robot (known as sim-to-real). The result: Atlas landed its human-inspired 360-degree jump on the first attempt, the company said.

Boston Dynamics says the project showed that precise motor control and reinforcement learning need to work closely together.

What's next?

Wu said the team will keep working on joining low-level drive systems with whole-body reinforcement learning. The next project is about handling actuator failures. An actuator is the part that acts as a robot's joint.

The team is curious how reinforcement learning could produce new behaviours when one of those parts fails.

What came before?

Boston Dynamics retired its hydraulic Atlas in April 2024 and unveiled an all-electric version built for commercial work. At CES 2026 in January, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed the production Atlas and outlined plans to use it at Hyundai plants.