Boston Dynamics on Sept. 21, 2026, opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center, or RMAC, at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America near Savannah, Ga. The company says the first phase is up and running as a place to test and train Atlas robots for work in car manufacturing. Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics is moving Atlas from stage demos at shows such as CES into a permanent setup beside a working plant. How well the robots learn to put parts in order, and how much training data the center produces, will help decide whether plans for thousands of robots become reality.
The center is for training and testing; it does not mean tens of thousands of Atlas robots already staff the plant. For now, the company says, the work focuses on preparing car parts and putting them in the right order before they reach the line. Component assembly is the target by 2030, with repetitive and strenuous work such as heavy lifting later. A Boston Dynamics spokesperson declined to tell reporters how many robots are already working at the center, and said a handful of staff from Waltham, Mass., have moved to Georgia to support the training.
Boston Dynamics also set out Hyundai Motor Group's larger plans: starting with 25,000 Atlas robots at Hyundai Motor and Kia plants around the world over the next few years, and a new U.S. factory able to build 30,000 robots a year. Those are goals for the whole group, not a count of robots at the Georgia center.
In an interview, chief product and technology officer Zack Jackowski called the center a permanent "Robot Behavior Factory" that combines real parts, fixtures and work cells with Atlas robots and skilled pilots to produce data for training the robots' behavior. Jackowski said Atlas learns from sources including teleoperation, with a person steering the robot remotely, as with a remote control; reinforcement learning in simulation, learning by trial and error, with a reward for getting it right; and Universal Manipulation Interface devices. He also said the teams are learning as much about redesigning fixtures and packaging for humanoids as about the robot hardware itself.
Next year, Boston Dynamics says, the center will move into a new building at the Georgia plant about 10 times its current size. The company also plans to explore uses beyond cars with existing customers of its Spot and Stretch robots, in sectors such as aerospace, semiconductors, logistics, food and beverage, and life sciences. It is not yet known how many Atlas robots are working in Georgia today, whether their parts-sequencing skills will hold up at a real plant's pace, or whether the 25,000-robot plan will move at the speed the training allows rather than the speed of announcements.