For internet-goers, Boston Dynamics is that company that uploads insane videos of the humanoid Atlas robot doing backflips, of four-legged SpotMini opening doors and fighting off stick-wielding men, and as of last week, of a Segway-on-mescaline called Handle jetting around picking up and stacking boxes with a vacuum arm. For journalists and industry watchers, however, Boston Dynamics is that company that almost never talks about where all of this work is ultimately headed.

That’s beginning to change. The company is now teasing its ambitions as the four-legged SpotMini nears its commercial release. Today, Boston Dynamics is getting even more explicit about its vision with an announcement that it’s acquired a Silicon Valley startup called Kinema Systems, which builds vision software that helps industrial robot arms manipulate boxes. This acquisition is giving the Handle robot the gray matter it needs to follow SpotMini to market. What for years has been fodder for internet video gold is now taking shape as a unified vision of the robotic future.

One of the biggest obstacles holding robots back has been their limited perception. We humans enjoy a rich constellation of senses that help us navigate our surroundings. Robots need the same, lest they destroy themselves. Go to pick up a box, for example, and you as a human probably don’t think deeply about the lighting and how it may cast shadows that throw off your hand placement.

Kinema’s software—which is robot-agnostic, meaning it already works on a range of robots beyond Handle—helps the machine through all these challenges. “Their system is able to look at a stack of boxes,” says Michael Perry, vice president of business development at Boston Dynamics, “and no matter how ordered or disordered the boxes are, or the markings on top, or the lighting conditions, they're able to figure out which boxes are discrete from each other and to plan a path for grabbing the box.”

That’s a huge part of what Handle, a robot designed to work in warehouses, needs to do. But the robot will also rely on its overall shape to do its new job. This is where BD’s larger strategy gets even more interesting: Although Handle, Atlas, and SpotMini look almost nothing alike, they are in fact intimately connected.

“Handle isn't entirely different from Atlas,” says Boston Dynamics boss Marc Raibert. Indeed, a video of Atlas three years ago showed the robot picking up boxes with two arms that ended in stubs, arms that Handle wielded in its own video a year later. The challenges of bipedal locomotion are largely the same, namely the balance problems that a four-legged robot like SpotMini doesn’t share, as are the challenges of manipulation with two arms, which SpotMini (being the dog to Atlas’ human form) also doesn’t share.

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But this is the beauty of robots. You can iterate on their shapes to tailor them to different tasks and environments. Atlas walks on two legs and Handle rolls on two wheels, but either way, that bipedal locomotion cuts down on the robots’ footprint. “If it was a four-wheeled robot, it would have to be much larger in order to get that level of reach and lift boxes,” says Perry. “So this is a robot that's designed to go into human-purposed environments and still be able to complete a task.”