Boston Dynamics Brand Guidelines: MIT Leg Lab, BigDog, Spot, Atlas & Three Owners

A research spin-off that spent two decades on contracts.

Boston Dynamics began in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. English Wikipedia says it was founded by Marc Raibert and grew out of the Leg Laboratory, the research lab on dynamic legged robots that he ran at Carnegie Mellon University and then at MIT. The company’s own timeline puts it the same way — Raibert “spins off from the MIT Leg Lab” — and says he was joined soon after by Robert Playter, who had worked with him in the lab. Wikipedia also names Nancy Cornelius, the company’s first employee and later its finance chief, as a co-founder. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, outside Boston.

Its early work was not robots for sale. Wikipedia says it first made simulation software, including the DI-Guy human-simulation product used to replace naval training videos, and then physical robots funded by the US military research agency DARPA. These included the quadruped BigDog, built from 2005 as a robotic pack mule to accompany soldiers over rough ground and later shelved because it was judged too loud for combat; LittleDog, a small research platform maintained for other institutions; PETMAN, a humanoid for testing chemical protection suits; and the LS3, a militarised version of BigDog developed with the US Marine Corps. The company’s own timeline marks 2004 as the year BigDog first left the lab. For most of its life, The Robot Report wrote in 2021, Boston Dynamics “mainly operated as an R&D organization.”

Ownership then changed three times in under a decade. Google bought the company on 13 December 2013 and placed it in its Google X unit, Wikipedia says; just before the purchase, Boston Dynamics passed the DI-Guy software line to another Massachusetts firm. On 8 June 2017 Google’s parent Alphabet announced its sale to Japan’s SoftBank Group. Hyundai Motor Group agreed in December 2020 to buy a controlling stake and completed the deal on 21 June 2021, taking 80% while a SoftBank affiliate kept 20%, The Robot Report reported that day, noting that Hyundai was “the third owner of Boston Dynamics in seven years.”

Spot, Atlas and Stretch.

Spot changed the business. Wikipedia says the four-legged robot was revealed in June 2016, and that a promotional video of it opening a door for another robot reached the top of YouTube in November 2017. After a period in 2019 when it was leased only to selected partners, Spot went on general sale in June 2020; the company’s timeline calls 2020 the year Spot became commercially available, first to early adopters and then to industrial customers. Its software development kit has been public on GitHub since January 2020, Wikipedia says. Today the company’s website sells Spot with an arm, extra sensor payloads and packages for thermal, visual and acoustic inspection in plants, on construction sites and in other industrial settings.

Atlas, the humanoid, has had two lives. The company’s timeline dates the first-generation Atlas to 2013, and later versions appeared in widely shared videos such as “Atlas, The Next Generation” in February 2016 and “Parkour Atlas” in October 2018, according to Wikipedia. In April 2024 Boston Dynamics retired the hydraulic Atlas in favour of a new all-electric Atlas. The company says it unveiled Atlas at Hyundai Motor Group’s media day at CES 2026, and on 21 September 2026 it opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center inside Hyundai’s Metaplant America campus outside Savannah, Georgia, where it says Atlas robots are being trained on tasks such as sequencing car parts before assembly.

The third commercial line is warehouse work. Stretch, a wheeled robot with an arm and a suction gripper for moving boxes, was announced in a video on 29 March 2021, and the company’s website now offers it for container unloading and case picking. Wikipedia lists earlier research machines as well, among them the wheeled Handle and the Cheetah, which it says set a speed record for legged robots in 2012. In September 2021 Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed their first joint project, a Spot-based robot for patrolling factories, Wikipedia says. In April 2019 Boston Dynamics also bought Kinema Systems, a Silicon Valley start-up, to add to its warehouse work.

How humanoid makers present themselves.

Humanoid and legged-robot makers sell machines that most people have only seen on a screen, so video carries much of their identity. Boston Dynamics built a public following through clips of its robots: a 2017 video of the Spot quadruped opening a door for another robot reached the top of YouTube, “Parkour Atlas” followed in 2018, and in 2025 a troupe of robot dogs danced on America’s Got Talent, according to Wikipedia. When Hyundai Motor Group completed its purchase of the company in 2021, its announcement video showed Atlas dancing beside a child, The Robot Report noted.

The newer story is work. Makers now show their robots in factories and warehouses rather than in labs: Agility’s Digit handling totes for the logistics group GXO, and Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas being trained to sequence car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, as each company describes it. Press releases lean on customer names, pilot sites and hours of operation, and trade reporters such as The Robot Report and IEEE Spectrum follow those claims from launch to deployment.

Launches happen on stages built for that audience. Agility presented a redesigned Digit at ProMat, the material-handling show, in 2023, and Boston Dynamics unveiled its new Atlas at Hyundai’s media day at CES 2026, the companies say. Research conferences such as ICRA, the IEEE’s robotics and automation meeting, and the World Robot Conference in China play the same part for engineers and the trade.

Identities shift as the companies grow up. In March 2026 Agility Robotics became simply Agility, with a refreshed logo that the company said was inspired by the hardware and software it builds, The Robot Report reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where it builds its robots, and which claims rest only on its own word.

Ethics statements, a contested sale and a new chief executive.

Boston Dynamics has also set out positions on how its machines are used. In October 2022 it signed a pledge not to support the weaponisation of general-purpose robots and invited other robot makers to join; five other firms signed, Wikipedia says. In 2026 a sale of Spot robots to a US federal agency drew an employee petition, WBUR reported on 23 October 2026; the company said its terms of sale prohibit weaponising the robot.

Leadership has changed as well. Robert Playter, chief executive from 2019, stepped down in February 2026, and the chief financial officer, Amanda McMaster, served as interim chief executive, according to Wikipedia and the company’s own releases. On 6 October 2026 the company named Rohit Prasad, previously head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence at Amazon, as chief executive from 7 October. In June 2026 it announced plans to turn a large building in Waltham into a robotics and AI centre for manufacturing, training and research, consolidating operations from three nearby sites. Hyundai Motor Group has been its controlling owner since 2021, and the company says it is now preparing Atlas for work across the Group’s car plants.

For a design guide, Boston Dynamics shows a brand built largely in public, through dated videos of its machines from BigDog to the electric Atlas. Compare Hyundai, its controlling owner since 2021, and SoftBank, which owned it from 2017. For this guide we use graphite, a cool grey and a signal yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Boston Dynamics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.