Boston Dynamics is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert and five others. The company is best known for the development of BigDog, a quadrupedal robot designed for the U.S. military with funding from DARPA, and Atlas, a bipedal humanoid robot also funded by DARPA. Boston Dynamics is currently owned by SoftBank Group.
The company has created a number of other notable robots, such as Cheetah, Petman, RiSE (a six-limbed robot), SandFlea (an insect-like jumping robot), SpotMini (a small four-legged dog-like robot) and Handle (a wheeled industrial humanoid). In February 2016, Boston Dynamics released footage of Atlas performing parkour maneuvers.
In November 2017, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that SoftBank was in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. The deal was completed in early 2018.