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Google Acquires Seven Robot Companies, Wants Big Role in Robotics
- beauzero 13y agoOk...that's cool. Somehow I think this will become something serious and plausible vs. the cyber Monday drone package stunt.
- riggins 13y agothis will become something serious I agree. It seems to me that robots have the potential to have a greater impact than the internet, social, mobile. And that's not to diminish the profound change those innovations have brought about. It just seems that the ability to act in the physical world will bring incredible, profound changes.
- scrabble 13y agoThis is possible. Robots will certainly bring huge change some day. The problem is that it is definitely going to come before our social structures are ready for it. There's going to be a real hard time adapting to the fact that a very large number of jobs will no longer requires humans to do them.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoRobots will also be pretty useful to quell any and all unrest, so I'm sure it'll all balance out..
- adamb_ 13y agoYou've got to hand it to Google: They have vision.
- seiji 13y agoThey have powerful nerds with money combined with constant internal reorgs due to backstabbing politics. "stepped down" is the corporate version of political "to spend more time with his family." "You don't want me here? Fine! I'll go make my own org with my own cost center and blackjack and subordinates to sleep with. In fact, forget the new org."
- rfnslyr 13y agoDon't mistake money + engineers for vision!
- pdog 13y agoThey have computer vision! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision
- dljsjr 13y agoOne of the acquisitions (SCHAFT, Inc.) is a competitor in the current DARPA Robotics Challenge, and out of all of the teams that have shown off progress videos, SCHAFT has shown the greatest level of competence in handling the tasks as they're going to be structured at the Trials in Homestead in a few weeks. Very similar to what they did with the top team from the last DARPA Grand Challenge (self-driving cars).
- TheLegace 13y agoThere is a great documentary talking to the guys who engineered the robot. Interesting story they are a couple of research students at University of Tokyo wanting to develop the robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, but there is a rule at the University that no military funded projects are allowed. So these guys are doing it independently, pretty awesome guys I wish them the best. In the documentary[1], you can see how SCHAFT robot works in detail. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKiXM7bUypk&t=25m0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKiXM7bUypk&t=25m0s
- dljsjr 13y agoThe work they've done is definitely impressive. Really looking forward to seeing the robot do its stuff in person down in Homestead. Though Atlas is definitely nothing to sneeze at. I've become pretty fond of it since the summer :-)
- cryptoz 13y agoNYT piece by John Markoff: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/technology/google-puts-money-on-robots-using-the-man-behind-android.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/technology/google-puts-mon...
- shmageggy 13y agoAnd discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845178
- mccr8 13y agoYeah, this IEEE link is just a blogspam wrapper around the NYT story.
- swalsh 13y agoGoogle's not an ad company, they're an AI company. Ads just support them as they develop the tech. Articles like this keeps reinforcing that world view for me.
- programminggeek 13y agoNope, Google is an Ad company, they sell ads via tech, but you take away the ads, and Google can't afford to do tech. Almost every product and service they do is to sell ads either directly or indirectly. Even Google Apps is about selling ads. How? Well, if small businesses don't have decent tech infrastructure, they aren't likely going to be using AdWords as much are they and they'll use traditional ads like Yellow Pages. In case you aren't aware, Yellow Page ads and newspaper ads charge hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for minimal effective exposure. Google ads can be much more effective, but good luck selling toe people who can't even get decent email accounts setup for their business. Yeah, $5/user/month is decent money when you have 50+ employees on the system, but that's peanuts compared to the $5,000-10,000+ a month that company is likely paying in advertising. Google desperately wants those kinds of accounts and whether they are building a browser, an operating system, an email service, a social network, or a self driving car, it's always going to come back to selling advertising to businesses because that is worth far more than just about anything else Google can do to make money. Google, like Microsoft and Apple completely understands where they make their money and what business they are in, even if they do a lot of things to make techies happy. It's the ads. Always the ads.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mariusz79 13y agoIt looks to me that Google is desperately trying to replace their ad business with something new.
- Daishiman 13y ago... or they just have vision, like companies of old times used to (HP, Xerox, IBM). IBM has done basic science research like few companies ever have and nobody can claim they're planning to replace their current lines of business with electron microscopes or Watsons.
- snrip 13y agoOr supplement it at the very least. The profitability they enjoy with advertising is hard to achieve in any other existing industry, so they try to be a front runner for new industries: Self-driving cars, robotics and green energy. That is not to say they do not believe in the ad business. For the ad business the model seems to have moved towards getting more people online and have them do more online. Google put a smartphone into a billion hands. They wire up African and American cities to fiber. They made browsers far more capable and performant. They plan to fly balloons over the whole globe. All investments connected to the online business.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoIf you can get 45 billion pa out of robots in the next fiscal, please tell me how and I will help :-) Yes, of course they are, but they have the luxury of telling the ad world, actually you have as much as you can get, there is no more growth there, pay up for a decade till someone beats us, by which time robots and cars and space stuff ...
- melling 13y agoInvesting a lot of money in something that won't payoff for 10 years or so probably means they're not desperate. Perhaps it looks that way to someone who doesn't understand anything about business, but there are easier ways to make money than investing in a lot of long-term research that might not pay off.
- qbrass 13y ago
- hershel 13y agoRecently google also created a company to develop software for the construction industry, which they claim will reduce 30%-50% of the cost of construction[1]. The most likely scenario for that to happen is through pre-fabricated construction, meaning most of the construction happens in a factory. This fits perfectly well with robotics. [1]http://www.construction-manager.co.uk/news/googles-cloud-based-genie-set-torpedo-bim/ http://www.construction-manager.co.uk/news/googles-cloud-bas...
- huherto 13y agoI can imagine a scenario, they would be like 3D printers for houses. You provide the materials (think big legos), and the robots (X-copters may be) assemble everything.
- criley2 13y agoAnyone else remember the video of the Chinese prefab 30-story hotel that went up in like 30 days? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYFef_HRxRQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYFef_HRxRQ
- fudged71 13y agoReminds me of this http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips-over-in-shanghai/ http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips...
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago> I can imagine a scenario, they would be like 3D printers for houses. It's already being worked on. Search for "Contour Crafting".
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y agoPre-fabricated, and/or automated construction methods such as Contour Crafting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_crafting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_crafting http://innovation.uk.msn.com/design/the-3d-printer-that-can-build-a-house-in-24-hours http://innovation.uk.msn.com/design/the-3d-printer-that-can-...
- ape4 13y agoGoogle knows Android phones aren't really robots, right? ;)
- tonyplee 13y agoWe might have Motorola phone that's "Make in USA by GoogleBot" soon. Google probably can overtake Foxconn and it can scale up/out to build $90, $60, $40 Android phone.
- hopp_check 13y agoIs this investment in commercial robots or consumer robots?
- jpadkins 13y agoFoxconn already has 20k robots in production roles http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043026/foxconn-to-speed-up-robot-army-deployment-20000-robots-already-in-its-factories.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043026/foxconn-to-speed-up-r... Google is actually not in the lead (yet).
- samolang 13y agoI would assume that Google is aiming to increase the quality of robots, not just the quantity.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dreamdu5t 13y agoEnough of the PR. Get back to me when you've got a robot I can use instead of concept videos. This goes for drones, self-driving cars, and other robots.
- ef4 13y agoGoogle has become self-aware and is quietly assembling its robot army.
- salient 13y agoThat whole "Larry Page disappearing for a month" thing was probably when they replaced him with a real Android to take control of the company. Now that I think about it, his latest speech at Google I/O - when he "returned" - sounded pretty robotic, too.
- lispm 13y agoSo the NSA problem is already solved?
- eliben 13y agoHow is NSA's large-scale spying on the world, that's been going on in full scale since the 1950s, Google's problem?
- lispm 13y agoThey could engineer their products in such a way that they don't collect all this data and don't transfer it to servers in the USA. They could also stop cooperating with the NSA, they could also respect privacy of their users, etc. Google has a lot of things to do. Robots would not be high on my list.
- eliben 13y ago> don't collect all this data So you don't want GMail to actually collect your email? > stop cooperating with the NSA Ah, you mean they should start breaking the US law?
- lispm 13y agoI don't want my Mail to be stored in the USA, nicely unencrypted for the NSA. Sure not. Since GMail has this NSA problem, I'm not using it. > Ah, you mean they should start breaking the US law? Which law? The law the NSA is bending every day? Google can do a lot to support security and privacy of foreign user's data. They don't do anything. Actually they do everything to undermine it and to make it easy for the NSA to access this data.
- kev009 13y agoHypothesis? The web market is becoming more saturated and lower margin. They're fishing around for something sufficiently hard (capital intensive to keep agile players out) that will have bigger long term payoffs.
- Wohlf 13y agoFrom my roots in a Michigan automotive city, the first thing this makes me think about is the massive amount of jobs this will eliminate if successful. We will need drastic changes in social policy to make up for it, and I have absolutely no faith in the government and voters to make it happen. I find the idea of replacing millions of labor and service jobs with cheap robotics before the world is ready to accept the consequences terrifying.
- jpatokal 13y agoIf a job is so simple, repetitive and brainless that it can be automated, it's in humanity's best interest that it gets automated, and people are freed to do something more useful. Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying.
- riggins 13y agohave not been particularly terrifying. well that's not quite true. For mankind as a whole, no. For people who's livelihood has been automated ... its been pretty terrifying.
- brc 13y agoThat is a disengenious quote...the line partially quoted is 'the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying'. The OP specifically points out that individually, changes are bad, but as an aggregate, things generally get better.
- riggins 13y agonitpick. here's the spirit. Often people will dismiss the human consequences of innovation with the logic that it hasn't been all that bad in the past. But the reality is that for effected people it really has been all that bad. Take the Luddites. They seem kinda silly ... going around breaking mechanical looms ... until you put yourself in their shoes. These weren't the poorest of the poor, unskilled laborers. They were skilled laborers who put effort into learning a craft whose skills were suddenly devalued by automation. And that was bad enough for them that they were willing to risk death to destroy mechanical looms. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm
- grey 13y agoI'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but at I/O during his Q&A Larry Page talked a fair bit about how he wants to see manufacturing get more streamlined, Maybe this could be related? > Smartphones, Page said, are “relatively expensive,” with the raw material costs — glass and silicon — is “probably like $1, or something like that. I think glass is 50 cents a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much. So I think when I see people in industry making things, I ask this question, how far are you off the raw materials costs. So as an engineer, trying to go to first principles, what is the real issue? What’s the real issue around our power grids, or around manufacturing? I think a lot of people don’t ask those questions, and because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, that’s almost impossible to do. But if you took a fifty-year view, you’d probably make the investments you need to, and you’d probably even figure out how to make money. So, I encourage non-incremental thinking.” http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/05/15/google-ceo-page-address-developer-conference-takes-qa/ http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/05/15/google-c... (The first transcript I could find)
- cma 13y agoFirst principles and step back and look at the raw materials cost just sound like crude aping of Elon Musk
- gregpilling 13y agoI manufacture things out of steel. Steel costs 50 cents a pound for sheet and $2 a pound for welding wire. The freight to ship it to my distributors is another 50 cents a pound, and the advertising and marketing cost is about $2 a pound. So ultimately I agree with Page. The cost of manufacturing anything goes on along a 1/x curve over time, and approaches the raw material cost. Its the other costs that don't do that, like engineering talent, marketing spends, warehousing, shipping.
- znowi 13y agoYes, I can see that: droids on the streets and our homes conducting surveillance for Google and NSA :)
- state 13y agoAlthough this is somewhat unrelated, I have to say: my main concern upon seeing that Bot & Dolly / Autofuss were part of this list is what will happen to Front (http://www.autofuss.com/news http://www.autofuss.com/news). I find myself there nearly every day for coffee, along with a batch of other familiar hacker faces. I'm excited for the parent companies, and mostly find it funny that an acquisition may affect something I would usually think of as totally unrelated.
- radarsat1 13y agoWell this explains why I was contacted twice. My expertise is in robotics and each time I asked them why they were interested, since I wasn't aware of much robotics work at Google (other than self-driving cars.) First time I asked the recruiter to email me so I could contact him at a more appropriate time -- I was at work -- and never hard from him. Second time was by email, and I responded but never got a reply. Oh well. I just don't understand why they would get my hopes up and then never respond -- anyone know how Google recruiters work?
- gcb0 13y agonah. you will learn that the recruiters that google uses barely know your name. let alone your background.
- radarsat1 13y agoFigured it was something like that. Was surprised to be contacted out of the blue, but I figured if I ever really wanted to work there I'd probably have to be the one doing the contacting.
- MildlySerious 13y agoI love the speed at which they're pushing technology forward, but I'm also pretty worried that they're taking the lead in any industry that'll be a game changer in the future. They're getting seriously far ahead of everyone else. Even if they shut down everything for a single day these days, chaos would ensue. I wouldn't want society to be even more dependent on a single company..
- 31073 13y agoI had something for this. Something about killing Miles Dyson.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]