For a long time, Boston Dynamics was more or less a research laboratory, but unlike a university laboratory, they also had lots of professional engineers. They were content with perfecting their robots purely for internal research, and very impressively, they were able to secure finding for this for several decades, without ever selling anything. (It probably helped they they were DARPA's darlings from the very beginning of research in dynamically balancing robots.)<p>When Google bought them, many people assumed that these robots would fit in well with google's AI research interests. After all, not everything can be learned by scraping Internet! But for a variety of reasons, Atlas was not a satisfactory fit, and Boston Dynamics was resold first to SoftBank, and then to Hyundai. With these changes in ownership, there came a pressure to produce an actual sellable product, which hydraulic robots were not.<p>Considering the amount of effort that had been spent on perfecting hydraulic machinery at Boston Dynamics, this is a bittersweet ending to an era. They were arguably the best, the most experienced people in hydraulic robots, and now they are pivoting away from their core expertise.
Hopefully, they'll store one of the Atlas prototypes with long-term archival preservation in mind. Atlas may have a long and robust second act as a working exhibit in a future history museum.