Robert Playter

In 1986 he earned a BS in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Ohio State University.⁠[1]

At Ohio State University he was a top college gymnast.⁠[2]

In 1994 he received a PhD from MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the thesis “Passive dynamics in the control of gymnastic maneuvers,” advised by Marc Raibert and Christopher Atkeson.⁠[3]

As a graduate student he worked in Raibert’s MIT lab; after earning his PhD in 1994 he joined Boston Dynamics and stayed with the company.⁠[2]

In 1995, as a postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Leg Lab, he built a launcher to fling a doll into a somersault; his experiments showed the rotation could be easily stabilized by passive arm movements.⁠[4]

In July 2013, when DARPA unveiled the Atlas humanoid for its Robotics Challenge, he, then president of Boston Dynamics, ran Atlas through basic tests for the press and teams, including walking on a treadmill.⁠[5]

In a 2026 letter to staff he recalled: “I accepted the position of CEO in the fall of 2019 as the company stood at an inflection point.”⁠[6]

The handover took place without announcement, with Raibert becoming chairman. Playter said: “Marc and I have known each other for 30 years.”⁠[7]

On June 16, 2020, Boston Dynamics opened commercial sales of its Spot quadruped robot, offering the Spot Explorer developer kit for $74,500.⁠[8]

On December 11, 2020, Hyundai Motor Group and SoftBankSoftBank GroupSoftBank Group (SoftBank Group Corp.) is an investment holding company headquartered in Tokyo, founded by Masayoshi Son in 1981. Starting out as a distributor of personal computer software, it moved into the internet, broadband and mobile communications, and has since become an investment group centered on AI-related assets such as Arm, the SoftBank Vision Funds and OpenAI.Open the full entry agreed on the main terms for Hyundai to acquire a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics, valuing the company at $1.1 billion. He said he looked forward to working together “to continue to solve the world’s hardest robotics challenges for our customers.”⁠[9]

On March 29, 2021, the company unveiled Stretch, its first commercial robot designed for warehouses and distribution centers, starting with truck unloading. He said: “Stretch combines Boston Dynamics’ advancements in mobility, perception and manipulation.”⁠[10]

In 2022 he discussed commercialization at a TechCrunch robotics event, saying “Ninety percent of warehouses are still manually operated today.” Hyundai Motor Group had acquired the company from SoftBank in 2021; production Stretch robots were going to early customers including DHL Supply Chain, Gap and H&M, and the company had more than 500 employees.⁠[11]

On October 6, 2022, Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics and Unitree Robotics published an open letter pledging not to weaponize their advanced-mobility general-purpose robots. He said: “For this technology to be broadly accepted throughout society, the public needs to know they can trust it.”⁠[12]

On April 28, 2023, as Boston Dynamics CEO, he appeared on episode 374 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast; topics included the company’s early years, the Atlas humanoid, the DARPA Robotics Challenge, BigDog, Spot, Stretch, Handle, robots in homes, Tesla’s Optimus, ChatGPT, the Boston Dynamics AI Institute and fear of robots.⁠[13]

In August 2023 he said, “We see Stretch as being a labor enhancer. It’s not going to replace most jobs,” and added that “our dream is to become a serial robot company.”⁠[14]

In April 2024 the company introduced an all-electric Atlas to replace the hydraulic version. In an interview he called it the newest generation of an “almost 15-year effort in developing humanoids” and said it would launch as a product targeting industrial applications.⁠[15]

In November 2025 Ohio State University’s College of Engineering awarded him the Benjamin G. Lamme Meritorious Achievement Medal in recognition of his commercialization of R&D, leadership of the humanoid robot programs and the physics-based simulation software Digital Biomechanics, and the company’s entry into logistics automation.⁠[1]

In January 2026 Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of Atlas at CES; Hyundai planned to use it in its car plants in 2028, and Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry was to receive Atlas robots to integrate its Gemini Robotics models. He said: “This is the best robot we have ever built.”⁠[16]

On February 10, 2026, he announced in an internal memo that he would step down as chief executive. In 30 years at the company he had also served as vice president of engineering and chief operating officer; the company said he had transformed Boston Dynamics from a small research and development lab into a successful business.⁠[17]

The company said he planned to retire; his last day was February 27, 2026, with chief financial officer Amanda McMaster becoming interim CEO.⁠[6]

In his letter to staff he called the company’s growth “the ride of a lifetime” and said leading the team had been “the honor of my life.”⁠[18]

After he left at the end of February 2026, Amanda McMaster served as interim CEO; Boston Dynamics then appointed Rohit PrasadRohit PrasadRohit Prasad is an artificial intelligence executive who led work on Alexa and artificial general intelligence at Amazon and oversaw development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family; he has been chief executive officer of the robotics company Boston Dynamics since October 2026.Open the full entry as chief executive, effective October 7, 2026.⁠[19]

Boston Dynamics: Official website: https://bostondynamics.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]