Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., has made the call to sell its pioneering robotics company, Boston Dynamics. You may recall a video of a certain four legged robotic “dog” named Spot prancing about the Boston Dynamics complex.
Boston Dynamics has proven that they can construct a truly autonomous machine that is as sturdy as it is intelligent — no matter which way you kick it.
Bloomberg reports that Google, the company that was really turning the gears behind Boston Dynamics, were well on their way towards making major breakthroughs with their robot company.
But now someone else will have to pick up where they left off.
Because executives at Alphabet Inc. are reportedly impressed with Boston Dynamic’s innovation, but as for their revenue — not so much.
Google came to the the conclusion that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the immediate future.
Impatiently, they are putting the tech company, Boston Dynamics, up for sale for someone else to wait for it to grow into a major market force.
According to Google, some potential buyers include the Toyota Research Institute and Google competitor Amazon.com Inc — the latter being a company which already makes robots for its fulfillment centers.
Google had only been in acquisition of Boston Dynamics since the later part of 2013. Leading the deal was former chief of Android division, Andy Rubin. Rubin brought in 300 robotics engineers into Google to run the Boston Dynamics team.
After Rubin’s departure with Google Dynamics in October of 2014, the company took a major hit due to lack of leadership for their Google robot initiative.
Boston Dynamic executives also refused to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo. Amid their disagreements, Boston Dynamics failed to release any marketable products which would have satisfied Google.
In November, a meeting conducted by Alphabet Chief Executive Jonathan Rosenberg, aware of the tensions between Google and Boston Dynamics, said this on Boston Dynamics unorthodox timetable for producing immediate marketable products to create revenue.
“We as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years. There’s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years.”
Hopefully, someone is willing to take over financing Boston Dynamics Robots from Google. Otherwise, Boston Dynamics robots like the almost eerie comprehensible robot called “Atlas” will be doing nothing but collecting dust somewhere.
The Inquisitr recently entailed what the Boston Dynamics robot could mean for society as a whole.
Director of robotics at Google San Francisco, Aaron Edsinger, said that he had been trying to work with Boston Dynamics to create a more cost-effective and plausible robot for society to use.
He proposed an electric “quadruped” robot which would do better on the market. Bloomberg writes that the Google director’s efforts were for naught, as he claimed to have experienced “a bit of a brick wall” regarding tearing down the division between Google and Boston Dynamics.
Is Google Severing Ties With Boston Dynamics Far Too Soon?
Former MIT professor and founder of Boston Dynamics said, Marc Raibert, said this of the division between Boston Dynamics and Google Robots.
“I firmly believe the only way to get to a product is through the work we are doing in Boston. (I) don’t think we are the pie in the sky guys as much as everyone thinks we are.”
VentureBeat reports that Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992. The institution was a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since its incumbent, Boston Dynamics has already been funded by the United State’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Do you think that Google is giving up on Boston Dynamics too soon?
[Image via Getty Images/Boston Globe]
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