This is not very surprising. From Boston Dynamic's recently released robots and their proposed direction for the future it was pretty clear they were not workin

This is not very surprising. From Boston Dynamic's recently released robots and their proposed direction for the future it was pretty clear they were not working with the other robotics divisions. Almost all of the robots Boston Dynamics has made are hydraulically actuated. In fact, pretty much all the robots Marc Raibert made when he was at MIT's leg lab were hydraulic. They are pretty dead set on this approach[0]. This is in contrast with google's other divisions Meka Robotics and SCHAFT which use electric actuation. Heck, SCHAFT's whole shtick is that they were able to make stronger more powerful electric actuators. Not to mention a big part of Meka's tech are their electric series elastic actuators. Boston Dynamic's message that their next robot will be hydraulic too but 3d printed, was a pretty strong indication they were not going to work with them. It might even show that Boston Dynamics is more of a hardware company, focusing on building robot systems, rather a software company, focusing on walking algorithms. This battle over hydraulics vs electric actuators has been fought before in the robotics industry and hydraulics lost[1]. While hydraulics were stronger, electric actuators were more reliable. More reliability means said robot generates more value before it breaks down. [0] http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150818-google-partially-3d-printed-humanoid-atlas-robot-goes-on-successful-walk-in-the-woods.html http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150818-google-partially-3d-p... [1] http://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/article/the_first_industrial_robot_why_it_failed/P2 http://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/article/the_first_indu...