Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics, gave the world a menagerie of two- and four-legged machines capable of jaw-dropping parkour, infectious dance routines, and industrious shelf stacking. Raibert is now looking to lead a revolution in robot intelligence as well as acrobatics. And he says that recent advances in machine learning have accelerated his robots' ability to learn how to perform difficult moves without human help. "The hope is that we'll be able to produce lots of behavior without having to handcraft everything that robots do," Raibert told me recently. Boston Dynamics might have pioneered legged robots, but it's now part of a crowded pack of companies offering robot dogs and humanoids.

The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesn't move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robot's ring-light head turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed.

Anyone currently worrying about artificial intelligence taking over the world may want to swing by the Boston Dynamics AI Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While walking around, they'd see that the robots that might lead a future uprising are still trying to tie their shoelaces, metaphorically speaking. The Institute's founder and executive director, Marc Raibert, has built some of the world's most famous robots at his previous venture, Boston Dynamics. The company, acquired by Hyundai in 2020, has developed legged machines capable of running, leaping, and of course dancing with spryness that can veer into the uncanny. Raibert's creations include the four-legged, pony-sized Big Dog; its smaller dog-like buddy, Spot; and an acrobatic humanoid called Atlas.

I've yet to walk the entire floor at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year (that's the goal for this afternoon), but my sense is the majority of the robots present fit into one of two categories: robot vacuums or greeter robots. The two Xiaomi robots -- CyberOne and CyberDog -- may well have been the most prominent of the show, and neither were especially inspiring. It was fun finally seeing the Cyber One in person after writing about it seven months ago. The humanoid robot's stilted locomotion screamed "research prototype" in the first demo, and I'm plenty wary about phone makers getting "serious" about robotics. There was no demo in the booth this year, rendering it more of an expensive mechanical mannequin. CyberDog was moving, at least.

When Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics at the end of 2020, there were plenty of open questions. Chief among them was why we should assume this acquisition would be any different than the past few? The 30-year-old bleeding-edge robotics firm had been an uncomfortable fit for its last two owners, Google and SoftBank, but the Korean automotive giant insisted things would be different. The pairing has, thus far, been something of a mixed bag. As Boston Dynamics looks to pragmatic applications to commercialize robots like Spot and Stretch, Hyundai has used the technology for some wild sci-fi demos, including one at this year's CES featuring Spot hanging out on Mars as a metaverse avatar.

CES has always been a weird show for robotics. It's true the organization behind the show dropped the name "Consumer Electronics Show" some number of years ago (a fact it continues to be very insistent about in its press materials), but at its heart the show is still very much about consumer technologies. For robotics, consumer has been an exceedingly difficult nut to crack, for reasons of pricing, scalability and the general unpredictability of operating in uncontrolled environments. In much the same way that the robotic vacuum has long been the main exception to that rule, robotic vacuums have been the one consistent feature at the show over the past decade-plus. Back in 2020 (the last time TechCrunch attended the show in person), I wrote a piece titled, "Companies take baby steps toward home robots at CES." Fittingly (for reasons that will be made clear below), the first person I quoted in the piece was Labrador Systems co-founder/CEO Mike Dooley, who told me, "I think there are fewer fake robots this year."

"If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this," Anderson Cooper said while touring Boston Dynamics' Waltham workshop. Cooper was visiting for a "60 Minutes" segment which gave a behind-the-scenes look at the company and their life-like robots. The segment titled "Boston Dynamics: Inside the workshop where robots of the future are being built" initially aired in March – a few weeks after Anderson's visit – and was rebroadcast last night. Boston Dynamics is also featured on another online segment uploaded today, regarding their efforts to help create autonomous Mars rovers. Boston Dynamics gave 60 Minutes a rare look into how it created some of the most agile robots in the world. Cooper talked to Boston Dynamics' founder, Mark Raibert, and CEO, Robert Playter, as well as other technicians and employees.

How did Michael Crichton, Sean Connery, and Wesley Snipes factor into the creation of a preeminent robotics firm? The story begins on the movie set of the 1993 action thriller "Rising Sun," starring Connery and Snipes and based off the Crichton novel of the same name. It was during a week of filming under the hot California sun that Raibert, then a professor at MIT, realized there was more work to do. "We were providing robots for the background of a scene in the movie," said Raibert. "And we were there for a week. And it was a week of hell."

The man who designed some of the world's most advanced dynamic robots was on a daunting mission: programming his creations to dance to the beat with a mix of fluid, explosive and expressive motions that are almost human. Almost a year and half of choreography, simulation, programming and upgrades that were capped by two days of filming to produce a video running at less than 3 minutes. The clip, showing robots dancing to the 1962 hit "Do You Love Me?" by The Contours, was an instant hit on social media, attracting more than 23 million views during the first week. It shows two of Boston Dynamics' humanoid Atlas research robots doing the twist, the mashed potato and other classic moves, joined by Spot, a doglike robot, and Handle, a wheeled robot designed for lifting and moving boxes in a warehouse or truck. Boston Dynamics founder and chairperson Marc Raibert says what the robot maker learned was far more valuable.

It's impossible to talk about Boston Dynamics robots without acknowledging two things: They're a marvel of modern engineering, and their agility can be incredibly unnerving. A 46-second video of Spot the robot "dog" opening a door has more than 56 million views on YouTube. Atlas, the company's headless humanoid robot, can go for a jog or do parkour. And just last week, the company released new footage of Spot the robot recharging on its own. But even as many observers joke about a robot apocalypse--or the perhaps more realistic possibility that robots will simply take humans' jobs--Boston Dynamics insists these machines still have a long way to go.