Why Google May Have Bought Nest

 Robotics  

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal has a theory why Google recently purchased the smart thermostat company Nest for a reported $3.2 billion dollars — because at its core Nest is an artificial intelligence and robotics company.

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has an interesting theory as to why Google recently bought out the smart thermostat maker, Nest for a reported $3.2 billion.  Only last week the valuation of the company was pegged at $2 billion, which at the time was considered staggering.

According to Madrigal, at its core, the Tony Fadell-led Nest is a robotics company.  This aligns the acquisition with the recent others by Google in the robotics industry, including Boston Dynamics and DARPA Robotics Challenge stage champion, Schaft.  In total, over the last few months Google has attained eight top robotics companies.

Andy Rubin, who is heading up the robotics project at Google has not yet said what the company's focus is going to be for robotics.  While some have guessed the company is merely looking to improve automation and assembly robots, the Nest purchase may signal something more.

With Meka Robotics, Redwood Robotics and Industrial Perception technology under his roof, it seems like Rubin is suggesting that Google's creation might be able to move, reach, and grab things like a person. According to "several people with specific knowledge of the project," the robots will likely be used in manufacturing rather than sold to consumers, and might specifically be used in electronics assembly.

Related articles Dennis Hong On Robot Evolution and The DARPA Robotics Challenge  Rodney Brooks on Why We Will Rely on Robots  Towards Intelligent Humanoid Robots

Now with Nest, and its staff of former Apple designers and executives like Yoky Matsuoka, Google may be signalling even more towards the development of humanoid robot systems.  Her dream of creating a robotic tennis player still drives some of the behind-the-scenes thinking at Nest.  She has studied with Rodney Brooks while a student at MIT as well as studying artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Madrigal interviewed Matsuoka in 2012 and she explained why robotics and artificial intelligence are at the heart of Nest's capabilities.

 "The intersection of neuroscience and robotics is about how the human brain learns to do things and how machine learning comes in to augment that," she told Madrigal.  Matsuoka calls this neurobotics.  

This is the picture I constantly come back to. The yin yang between understanding human learning and machine learning and that combination, that intersection, is exactly where I live. Some things, machines shouldn't learn it. We should let people learn it. Because otherwise people are gonna get lazy and never adapt. And that's a bad thing for rehabilitation. If we want them to get better. Machines probably shouldn't do all the things. But at the same time, things humans are really bad at, maybe machines should be learning that for them, ahead of time. Understand exactly how humans are like and then slowly maybe let humans take control back.

Madrigal concludes: "Nest is a cryptorobotics company. It deals in sensing, automation, and control. It may not make a personable, humanoid robot, but it is producing machine intelligences that can do things in the physical world."


SOURCE  The Atlantic

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square