Marc Raibert
Founder of Boston Dynamics and pioneer of dynamic legged robotics.
Marc Raibert is an American engineer whose career established the technical foundations of contemporary dynamic legged robotics. He founded Boston Dynamics in 1992 as a spinoff from his academic work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and subsequently led the company through the development of a series of quadruped and bipedal platforms including Atlas. In 2022, he founded the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, a research organization pursuing the next generation of robotics research beyond Boston Dynamics' commercial scope.
Role in humanoid robotics
Raibert's contribution to humanoid robotics is foundational. The dynamic balancing algorithms he developed at the CMU Leg Laboratory in the 1980s and at the MIT Leg Laboratory in the 1990s set the technical vocabulary for the field. The Atlas platform, developed under his direction at Boston Dynamics from 2013 onward, was the reference full-form humanoid platform of the mid-2010s and remains one of the most technically influential platforms of the current commercial era. The parkour demonstrations released by Boston Dynamics during Raibert's tenure (backflips, jump landings, precision walking over uneven terrain) established the public perception of what humanoid platforms could physically do.
Following his transition from active leadership at Boston Dynamics, Raibert has focused on longer-horizon research through the Boston Dynamics AI Institute. His public appearances and technical talks continue to shape discussion of where the field is going.
Background
Raibert received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Northeastern University and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He held academic appointments at Carnegie Mellon University (where he founded the CMU Leg Laboratory) and at MIT before founding Boston Dynamics. His academic work on dynamic balance and legged locomotion is widely cited across the robotics literature.