Watch a rare video of robots jumping and dancing inside one of America’s leading robotics firms

• “60 Minutes” got a rare, inside look at American robotics giant Boston Dynamics.
• Inside the company’s headquarters, robots leap and dance.
• Spot and Atlas, the company’s dog-like and humanoid robots, are featured prominently.

Maybe you’ve seen Boston Dynamics’ eerily lifelike robots dancing or pulling a massive truck or hiking through the woods, but a new video offers a rare glimpse inside the place where the machines are created.

As “60 Minutes” correspondent and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper says in the video: “If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this.”

Cooper visited the headquarters of Boston Dynamics in Waltham, Massachusetts, for a segment that aired this weekend. Inside, he got a tour of the company that has dominated popular interest in robotics for years.
In the lengthy segment, he speaks with founder Marc Raibert and sees a demonstration of the company’s Atlas robot: a life-size humanoid robot that can jump and dance, all controlled remotely using an Xbox 360 gamepad.

Having emerged from MIT, Boston Dynamics was purchased by Google in 2013 and was subsequently sold twice – first to Softbank, and then to South Korean automaker Hyundai in late 2020.

The robotics maker is notorious for releasing amusing, if occasionally eerie, videos of its robots performing animal-like or humanoid tasks. It began selling its flagship robot, the dog-like Spot, in November 2020 for a starting price of $75,000.

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