Google has acquired robotics engineering company Boston Dynamics, best known for its line of quadrupeds with funny gaits and often mind-blowing capabilities. Products that the firm has demonstrated in recent years include BigDog, a motorized robot that can handle ice and snow, the 29 mile-per-hour Cheetah, and an eerily convincing humanoid known as PETMAN.
Boston Dynamics, which contracts for the US military, is the eighth robotics company snapped up by Google this year. Both the price and size of the project, which is led by former Android boss Andy Rubin, are being kept under wraps. However, analysts say the purchases signal a rising interest in robotics use by consumer internet companies.
"We are looking forward to this next chapter in robotics and in what we can accomplish as part of the Google team," Boston Dynamics co-founder Marc Raibert said via email.
In an excellent piece of reporting, The New York Times' John Markoff reveals that, led by the former head of its Android mobile operating system, Google is quietly buying up robotics startups for a project that appears more than just experimental.
"If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones," Markoff writes, "is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?"
The difference between Amazon's drone stunt and Google's retail robot skunkworks, run by Andy Rubin, is that it seems far more serious. While Amazon released an unrealistic marketing video that had little to do with how its operations really work, Markoff's sources say that Google is taking incremental steps to automate steps all along the consumer-product supply chain, from manufacturing to shipping.
Robots developed by Boston Dynamics include the insect-like Rise, which climbs vertical surfaces, and SquishBot, described as "a shape-changing chemical robot" that can move "through tight space." The company also developed the DI-Guy software tools for simulating human reactions and movements in different scenarios and events.
"Something about Google buying Boston Dynamics reminds me of Skynet," commented a YouTube user on Saturday after viewing the WildCat video, in reference to the evil artificial intelligence computer system of the Terminator movies.
Boston Dynamics, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, was founded in 1992 by Raibert and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its customers include all branches of the US Armed Forces, US government contractors and private-sector companies.
It consulted for Japanese electronics giant Sony on consumer applications such as Aibo, a robot dog.
But it mostly develops mobile and off-road robotics technology, funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.
Google has said it would honour the existing military contracts with Darpa.
Boston Dynamics' videos of its walking robots have garnered millions of views online.
Source: Voice of Russia
