Google Swallowing Up Robotics Companies

 Robotics  

Google's former head of Android software is now taking the company in a new direction. Andy Rubin is spearheading an effort at Google that includes the acquisition of seven key robotics companies.

In a recent article for the New York Times, writer John Markoff talked with Google's former head of Android on how the company is now becoming heavily involved in robotics, including acquiring many up-and-comer companies.

Over the last half-year, Google has quietly bought up seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. The engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones.

It is suspected that the company’s robotics aims are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to Markoff's sources.

The companies Google has acquired are Schaft, a small team of Japanese roboticists who recently left Tokyo University to develop a humanoid robot for commercialization and for competition in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and Industrial Perception, a U.S. start-up that has developed computer vision systems and robot arms for loading and unloading trucks. 

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Also bought out were Meka Robotics and Redwood Robotics, makers of humanoid robots and robot arms in San Francisco, and Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems that were recently used to create special effects in the movie “Gravity.” A related firm, Autofuss, which focuses on advertising and design, and Holomni, a small design firm that makes powered caster wheels, were also acquired.

The seven companies are capable of creating technologies needed to build a mobile, dexterous robot. Mr. Rubin told the New York Times he was also pursuing additional acquisitions.

In the bigger business picture, the convergence of the technology industry (some might even call it a Singularity-like phenomenon) in the areas of artificial intelligence, connectivity, distribution (including robotics) and other exponential technologies, point to how the big names like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are increasingly focusing on 'moonshot' thinking in order to stay ahead of their competition.

Amazon recently unveiled what some might call just a marketing pitch in terms of the Amazon Prime drone delivery concept. Jeff Bezos, in an interview on 60 Minutes unveiled the concept and said the company may begin to roll-out the service in as little as five years. Same day delivery has already been on Google's roadmap.

Automating those elements of the supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep is all a part of this push.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business tells Markoff. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

Rubin said of Google's foray, “I feel with robotics it’s a green field,” he said. “We’re building hardware, we’re building software. We’re building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack.”

SOURCE  New York Times

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