Boston Dynamics changes hands, former Amazon executive becomes CEO波士顿动力换帅，亚马逊前高管出任 CEO

IT House, Oct. 7 (Xinhua) -- Boston Dynamics has named former Amazon executive Rohit Prasad as its chief executive. The robotics company, which is controlled by Hyundai Motor Group, will be led by him to enter a new stage of innovation and commercialization of robotics technology. Boston Dynamics, famous for its flexible humanoid robots, is currently developing robot systems for industry and various real-world scenarios, that is, the field of physical artificial intelligence (physical AI). Hyundai Motor acquired a majority stake in Boston Dynamics in 2021; the group said earlier this year that it plans to put Atlas humanoid robots into production at its own factory in Georgia starting in 2028 and build a capacity of up to 30,000 humanoid robots per year. IT House noted a Boston Dynamics personnel announcement on Tuesday that Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon building and expanding Alexa, a smart voice assistant. Prior to joining Amazon, he also spent 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he was responsible for research in the direction of machine learning and landing applications for U.S. government and commercial customers. Earlier this year, Robert Playter stepped down from his six-year tenure as CEO of Boston Dynamics. He is only the second CEO of a company with more than three decades of history. Since then, several top executives have left the company, including CTO Aaron Saunders. At the same time, Hyundai Motor is moving to acquire the remaining shares of Boston Dynamics held by SoftBank Group in order to completely take over the robot pioneer company. Hyundai has also entered into a strategic partnership with Nvidia and Google DeepMind to develop the Atlas robot. The robots are expected to undertake simple tasks such as welding and logistics in advance; by around 2030, they will gradually be put into more complex manufacturing processes such as parts assembly.