Boston Dynamics puts roller skates on Atlas, RL nails mid-air 360 spin on first try
LinusEkenstam · x · 2026-11-10
Boston Dynamics bolted roller wheels onto its humanoid Atlas robot, letting it drift around warehouses and land mid-air 360 spins — possibly the wildest robotics flex of the year.
Key technical details:
- The wheels aren't a product; they're a torture test pushing Atlas's motors and actuators to their absolute limits
- For the jumping 360 spin, the team fed human motion-capture footage into the RL pipeline — the robot nailed it on the very first try
- The side-to-side jump dashes involved zero hard-coding: the RL policy figured out on its own how to roll on the wheels mid-slide
- Everything was driven and tuned in simulation first, then transferred to the physical robot almost seamlessly
- Next up: training the RL brain to invent recovery moves on the fly when a motor fails mid-motion
The author notes most robotics startups are still trying to get humanoids to walk across a flat room, while Boston Dynamics put theirs on skates just to see if they could break the motors.
Related event: Boston Dynamics Puts Atlas on Wheels for Drifts and 360 Spins(4 posts)→
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