Atlas is specified at 70 cells and about 1.3 kilowatt-hours. The three minutes are a charge

TheElec reported on 7 November that Hyundai has finalised the battery specification for Atlas, the humanoid from Boston Dynamics. The account cites industry sources from 6 November. Each robot would use 70 cylindrical 2170 cells from Samsung SDI, 21 millimetres across and 70 millimetres tall, 5,000 milliamp-hours each, about 1.3 kilowatt-hours in a pack. LG Energy Solution is also named. Samsung SDI, the paper says, is expected to handle virtually all of the early shipments, because volumes are still small. Hyundai Mobis has the Atlas brief inside the group. Boston Dynamics and Samsung have not confirmed the specification.

The sentence on time is easy to reverse. TheElec says that, for Atlas, “battery replacement and charging take one hour and 30 minutes and less than three minutes, respectively.” Respectively puts the hour and a half on the replacement, and the three minutes on the charge. A three-minute charge is not a three-minute swap, and the paper does not say the robot changes its own pack. It also says a typical humanoid runs for about two to four hours. Typical is not a measured Atlas shift. Mass production, the same account says, is 2028 or later. The same 2170 cells are to be tried first on Spot 2. TheElec puts about 500 of the earlier Spot robots at Hyundai’s Metaplant in Georgia. Those are inspection dogs, not Atlases.

A specification in a trade paper is not a purchase order. The request to prepare for 10,000 Atlases is a separate account, from late October, and that report said quantities and prices were still open. A cell count does not close it.