Boston Dynamics put wheels on Atlas, and it landed a spin jump on the first try
Boston Dynamics swapped a humanoid robot's feet for wheels and had it land a spinning jump, while saying the wheels themselves are not for sale.
Boston Dynamics released a video on November 9, 2026, showing its Atlas humanoid robot with its feet swapped for wheels. Atlas rolled into a crouch, launched into the air, spun a full 360 degrees and landed upright. The spin worked on the first attempt, with no retries shown in the footage.
The hardware change was small. Engineers bolted off-the-shelf scooter wheels onto Atlas’s existing ankle motors through a custom adapter, rather than rebuilding the legs. A wheel spins continuously in a way a human-style ankle joint cannot, so the control software had to learn an entirely new way of moving.
The spin was trained in computer simulation before it ever ran on the physical robot. Boston Dynamics said its engineers measured how the real motors behaved under load and fed those numbers back into the simulation, narrowing the usual gap between a simulated robot and the hardware underneath it.
Andy Wu, a Boston Dynamics controls engineer, described the goal as testing what the company called ‘unstructured environment adaptability,’ pushing the actuators toward their torque and speed limits. The wheels, he said, were a way to keep the motors working at that limit continuously, not just in short bursts.
Where the lessons are headed next
Boston Dynamics is not selling a wheeled Atlas, and has no plans to. The company said the actuator and control lessons from this experiment are already being folded into the standard, two-legged Atlas. Hyundai Motor Group, which now majority-owns Boston Dynamics, has a published roadmap that puts that version on factory floors starting in 2028, beginning with parts-sequencing work.
‘A wheeled Atlas isn’t a product. It’s a research testbed,’ the company said. No outlet has independently measured the motors’ sustained torque or speed under the wheeled load. Everything published about this run traces back to the video Boston Dynamics released and the company’s own account of it.
