Marc Raibert

Marc Raibert (born December 22, 1949) is the Executive Director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, a Hyundai Motor Group organization that is focused on solving the most important problems in robotics and artificial intelligence to achieve fundamental advances in the engineering and science of robotics. Raibert was the founder, former CEO, and now Chairman of Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for creating BigDog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle.

Before starting Boston Dynamics, Raibert was professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and an associate professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. At CMU he founded the Leg Laboratory (1980), a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots. Raibert developed the first self-balancing hopping robots, a significant step forward in robotics. Raibert earned an Electrical Engineering, BSEE from Northeastern University in 1973 and a PhD from MIT in 1977. His dissertation was titled "Motor control and learning by the state space model" and was advised by Berthold Horn and Whitman Richards. Raibert is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 for biomechanically motivated analysis, synthesis, control, and application of multi-legged robots.

Raibert's dream is to advance bipedal and quadrupedal robotics to a supernatural state. Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google in December 2013. On the acquisition, Raibert commented that he was "excited by Andy Rubin and Google’s ability to think very, very big... with the resources to make it happen." In March 2016, Google began offering Boston Dynamics for sale. The company was acquired by SoftBank in June 2017. In 2020, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Hyundai Motor Group.