--- description: Everyone's favorite terrifying humanoid is about to lose the cables and tubes that feed it a steady diet of power, fluids and data. title: DARPA-Funded Atlas Robot to Go Tetherless in the Next Six Months image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2a09335ec3ee634/69868957adae4427d954266e/atlas1280.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Business](/section/business/) ## Business Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Tech](/tag/time-section-tech/) ## Tech Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # DARPA-Funded Atlas Robot to Go Tetherless in the Next Six Months by [Doug Aamoth](/author/doug-aamoth/) ## Doug Aamoth Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Apr 7, 2014 9:00 PM CUT  Doug Aamoth / TIME by [Doug Aamoth](/author/doug-aamoth/) ## Doug Aamoth Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Apr 7, 2014 9:00 PM CUT We’ve written about [Boston Dynamics’ DARPA-funded Atlas](http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot%5FAtlas.html "undefined") robot [again](http://techland.time.com/2013/07/12/darpas-atlas-robot-the-lovechild-of-johnny-five-and-a-flayed-t-800/ "undefined") and [again](http://techland.time.com/2013/10/07/as-you-sleep-tonight-dream-about-these-two-robots-chasing-you/ "undefined") and [again](http://techland.time.com/2013/12/14/google-adds-more-robots-to-its-robot-army/ "undefined"), but I got a chance to meet Atlas in person today and found out that everyone’s favorite terrifying humanoid is about to lose the system of cables and tubes that feeds it a steady diet of power, fluids and data. Atlas has been handed over to CSAIL – the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory – at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where [Team MIT](http://drc.mit.edu/ "undefined") has been responsible for getting the robot in shape for [the DARPA Robotics Challenge](http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/ "undefined"). It’s a series of competitions eventually culminating next year in a $2 million prize given to the winning team. MIT has been rejiggering Atlas’s code to make it faster and more autonomous: In the above video, postdoctoral associate Scott Kuindersma gives a brief overview of Atlas’s various parts, and explains how the robot’s being coded so that it can make its own decisions in certain instances and operate on its own during a blackout period of up to 30 seconds. The end of the video features a demo in which Atlas comes across an obstacle – in this case, a two-by-four – and removes it from its path. This demonstration of decision-making, along with figuring out how to get Atlas to move about untethered (the actual hardware modifications would be done by Boston Dynamics) are a couple of the tasks that the MIT team is working on for the next round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which takes place in December. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/52556/darpa-funded-atlas-robot-to-go-tetherless-in-the-next-six-months/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/52556/darpa-funded-atlas-robot-to-go-tetherless-in-the-next-six-months/"},"headline":"DARPA-Funded Atlas Robot to Go Tetherless in the Next Six Months","datePublished":"2014-04-07T21:00:40.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:01:54.750Z","description":"Everyone's favorite terrifying humanoid is about to lose the cables and tubes that feed it a steady diet of power, fluids and data.","url":"https://time.com/52556/darpa-funded-atlas-robot-to-go-tetherless-in-the-next-six-months/","keywords":["Tech","Google","robotics","robots","MIT","DARPA"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2a09335ec3ee634/69868957adae4427d954266e/atlas1280.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Doug Aamoth","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/doug-aamoth/"}],"articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2a09335ec3ee634/69868957adae4427d954266e/atlas1280.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"atlas","caption":"atlas","creditText":"Doug Aamoth / TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/52556/darpa-funded-atlas-robot-to-go-tetherless-in-the-next-six-months/","name":"DARPA-Funded Atlas Robot to Go Tetherless in the Next Six Months"}}]}] ```