Atlas on a Roll | Classical Motor Controls and Whole-Body RL | Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics has put its electric Atlas humanoid on wheels — and the result is one of the most agile demonstrations the Waltham, Massachusetts lab has ever published. Atlas swaps its feet for two motorized wheels, yet still lands a full 360-degree mid-air spin, executes a snappy lateral “side dash,” drifts through turns between warehouse shelving and reverses at speed while crouching to drop its centre of gravity. Controls engineer Andy Wu is clear that the spectacle is not the point: wheeled locomotion is a deliberate testbed that pushes Atlas's actuators to the very edge of their performance envelope, so a learned whole-body reinforcement-learning controller can be proven on real hardware — including the emergent behaviours it invents when an actuator fails. Motion-capture reference jumps, an Xbox-controller simulation session and split-screen sim-versus-reality shots make this a rare behind-the-scenes look at how humanoids are actually made reliable. By: Boston Dynamics, published on November 9, 2026.