I visited their office many years ago and they were absolutely working on cleaning up trash in an office environment as their main task. Not sure what you saw.

I visited their office many years ago and they were absolutely working on cleaning up trash in an office environment as their main task. Not sure what you saw. The robot seemed too slow and incapable to do almost any other useful task. At the time I thought they were clearly focused on the wrong things and I'm not at all surprised the department was cut. Google should have cut this earlier and kept Boston Dynamics instead. I mean it's cool work but my opinion is that general AI advancements are going to dramatically change how all this is done in pretty short order. Meanwhile the hardware side of things is in need of way more investment, and that investment won't be obsoleted as the software improves, in fact quite the opposite. The investment will pay off in spades when the software suddenly becomes able to do many more tasks given a capable body. Google was too impatient to keep investing in hardware until the software was ready.