Boston Dynamics swaps its Atlas humanoid robot’s feet for scooter wheels to test how hard its motors can work
The wheeled Atlas is a test machine, not a product, the company says. It learned its rolling moves in millions of computer simulations.
Boston Dynamics has bolted scooter wheels onto its Atlas humanoid robot in place of feet, according to a company blog post published Nov. 9. A video shows the robot rolling through a warehouse, sliding sideways and doing a 360-degree jump. Boston Dynamics, which began in 1992 as a spinoff from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab, also makes Spot, a four-legged robot, and Stretch, a robot that moves boxes in warehouses.
Why wheels
The company says a wheeled Atlas is not a product but a test machine. Driving on wheels makes the motors run at high power and high speed nonstop, which let engineers see how they behave at their limits. The only new part was an adapter that mounts an off-the-shelf scooter rim on the robot’s ankle motor. In the software, each wheel is treated as an ankle that can spin forever.
How the robot learned to roll
Atlas learned its moves through reinforcement learning, a kind of AI training where a program tries actions millions of times in a computer simulation and is rewarded when it succeeds. The hard part, the company says, is making the simulated motors behave like the real ones. If the simulation is too perfect, the robot learns moves its real body cannot do. Engineers call this the “sim-to-real gap.”
Some moves were copied from recordings of people. Where a person would slide their feet, the AI figured out on its own to roll, wrote controls engineer Xiaoyu (Andy) Wu. The company says lessons from the test are already going into the standard, walking Atlas, including how the robot should react when a motor fails.
Source: Boston Dynamics blog, Nov. 9, 2026.