Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up For Sale In Robotics Retreat (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes from an article on Bloomberg: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn't likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, said, "we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "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." In December, Google announced that Replicant had been folded into Google's advanced research group, Google X. In a private all-hands meeting around that time, Astro Teller, the head of Google X, told Replicant employees that if robotics aren't the practical solution to problems that Google was trying to solve, they would be reassigned to work on other things, according to a person who was at that meeting. Boston Dynamics, though, was never folded into Google X and was instead put up for sale.

Comments

Re:Quelle surprise

[phantomfive]

The robots they've built are really quite nice looking. If you haven't seen the video, you should check it out.

Re:BD had a product - Google effed them

[dj245]

The impression I had was that Big Dog was their big product. Google bought them and killed the program cause they don't do defense work. I thought the Army saying Big Dog didn't meet noise requirements was something that allowed everyone to save face.

Maybe Google shouldn't have bought a robotics company that was primarily defense funded...

I read somewhere that soldiers hated Big Dog because of the noise and limited use cases, and that soldiers preferred wheeled vehicles that they could ride in. You could probably ride on Big Dog and similar legged robots, but it wouldn't be very comfortable.

Just something I read on the internet but it makes sense. Getting rid of the group seems a bit odd though. Maybe Google is thinking that when humanoid robots are finally "ready" as a consumer product, they can just buy a company and get back in the game. Or maybe they feel that Boston Dynamics costs too much and can't compete in the free market. Their robots did lose the Darpa Robot Challenge to research universities, after all.