Boston Dynamics Names Amazon's Rohit Prasad CEO the Week It Showed a 13-Joint Atlas Hand

Boston Dynamics named Rohit Prasad chief executive effective October 7, handing the Hyundai-owned robot maker to the former head of Amazon's Alexa and AGI science team. He succeeds Robert Playter, who stepped down in late February, according to Robotics 24/7 and a Reuters report carried by The Star.

Amanda McMaster ran the company as interim chief executive in the gap, Robotics 24/7 reports.

Who Prasad is and what was said

Prasad was senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon. He spent 12 years there and led development of the Nova foundation model family.

Boston Dynamics said he brings experience in "turning physical AI breakthroughs into commercial success."

Jaehoon Chang, vice chair of Hyundai Motor Group and chair of the Boston Dynamics board, said: "We are thrilled to welcome Rohit to lead the company into this exciting new era of real-world Physical AI." Prasad said: "Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise."

Neither report gives a compensation figure or a revised product plan. Neither mentions an initial public offering.

The hand announced six days earlier

On October 1, IEEE Spectrum's Evan Ackerman reported that Boston Dynamics had redesigned the hand for its Atlas robot. Robotics 24/7 covered the same announcement on October 2, citing a company blog post.

Spec	Previous hand	New hand
Degrees of freedom	7	13
Digits	not stated	3 fingers, 1 thumb
Thumb joints	not stated	4
Actuation	not stated	Direct drive at each joint

The new hand has three fingers with 3 degrees of freedom each and a thumb with 4. It has no pinky. Ackerman wrote that the team made that choice after a day of taping pinkies to ring fingers.

The actuators are enclosed in the joints, with no cables crossing joints. Robotics 24/7 lists triggered grasps for drills, torque drivers, grinders, nail guns and welding torches, and says the hand is similar in size to a large human hand.

What the engineers said

Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, said, in IEEE Spectrum's report: "Hands are a ruthless design trade-off." He also said: "There's no way around it, you're always giving up on something."

On volume, Rodriguez described the work of "figuring out what needs to change in the fine details of our design if we want to make 100,000 of these hands a year." That is a design target, not a production figure.

1. Previous Atlas hand7 DoF
2. New Atlas hand13 DoF

Source: IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 1, and Robotics 24/7, Oct. 2, 2026; accessed 2026-10-09

What neither source establishes

Neither report says whether any demonstration of the new hand was autonomous or teleoperated. Neither gives a count of Atlas units working at a customer site. Robotics 24/7 describes the current Atlas as having a payload above 100 lb and does not give a runtime or a price.

The only volume number on the Hyundai side comes from January. Hyundai Motor Group said it aims to build a factory able to make 30,000 robot units a year by 2028, and to start deploying them across all its manufacturing sites in 2028, per The Star.

A 30,000-unit capacity target and a 100,000-hand design target are plans. As of October 9, no shipped quantity has been published in the sources reviewed.

What follows

Prasad's start date is October 7. The next dated milestone in the sources is Hyundai's 2028 factory and deployment target.

For other physical-AI stories on this site, see AWS's open-source physical AI toolchain and the $60 million Series B for Mecka AI.