Hyundai 'School of Football' Campaign to Promote Physical AI

Hyundai Motor Company has announced the launch of its global ‘School of Football’ Campaign, featuring Atlas, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot. 

Created as part of Hyundai’s wider ‘Next Starts Now’ global platform for the FIFA World Cup 2026, the company says the campaign has been created to use “football as a universal language to explore the future of human-centred robotics through expression, emotion and sport”.

Instead of following traditional product demonstration conventions, Hyundai has taken a narrative-driven approach to the campaign – following Atlas as it “observes human passion and creativity in football,” before learning the sport itself. This is designed to highlight how robotics can evolve to better reflect human curiosity and adaptability. 

“Through ‘School of Football,’ Hyundai Motor is using the universal language of football to showcase the next chapter of robotics in a way that is engaging, intuitive and human-centred,” says Sungwon Jee, Executive Vice President and Global Chief Marketing Officer at Hyundai Motor Company. 

“As excitement builds ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026™, Atlas’ journey reflects our belief that innovation begins with people – their passion, creativity and expression – and that robotics can help expand what is possible for the future.”

Atlas was first launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 by Boston Dynamics and Hyundai, and is designed to be an “enterprise grade humanoid robot” that can perform a wide array of industrial tasks, according to Boston Dynamics. 

School of Football

The ‘School of Football’ campaign is a five-part episodic series, which follows Atlas’ learning journey, from initial discovery to learning the sport. 

Atlas begins by observing fans’ emotion and energy, which sparks curiosity about football. This then progresses into foundational training, such as footwork and passing, and is designed to mirror human learning processes and showcase progressive skills development in robotics. 

The campaign has been rolled out on the company’s global social channels, and was accompanied by a reaction video featuring Son Heung-min, the company’s global brand ambassador – further extending the campaign’s reach across social platforms. 

Showcasing physical AI capabilities

According to Hyundai, this campaign is designed to emphasise continuous learning, repetition and optimisation – core principles in both football training and robotics development. 

‘School of Football’ showcases the capabilities of Atlas and physical AI through the lens of sport-inspired environments. 

Hyundai has shared that all movements featured in the campaign were performed by Atlas, without the use of CGI – requiring a high level of difficulty for some moves that goes beyond motion replication. 

To achieve some of the more difficult moves showcased in the campaign, Atlas analysed and modelled real human football movement data at a granular level. From there, the movements were translated into a simulation environment, where Atlas was trained through reinforcement learning. 

This required a combination of capabilities, including dynamic balance control in asymmetrical postures, real-time adaptation to shifting weight and momentum and precision motor control under physically constrained conditions. 

The campaign was launched as part of Hyundai's vision  of ‘Progress for Humanity,” with the company saying it sees humanoids as a key growth area in the global physical AI market. 

Hyundai has said it plans to train Atlas at the Robot Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) within Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Savannah, Georgia, with the aim of deploying it in industrial environments to advance human-robot collaboration.