The idea is right but if by "release" you mean "sell to consumers" I think you're a little over-optimistic about the timeline. Google's driverless car project

The idea is right but if by "release" you mean "sell to consumers" I think you're a little over-optimistic about the timeline. Google's driverless car project is a direct descendant of the tech developed for the DARPA Grand/Urban Challenges. Those took place in 2005-2007 [1]. It's been ~9 years since the first Grand Challenge, and while there has been great progress in this area no one will sell me an autonomous car just yet. The first DARPA robotics challenge was held in December of 2013 [2]. If you check out some of the videos from that competition [3] [4] (or some of the PR2 videos another user posted), you'll see that we can make general-purpose humanoids that can do some pretty neat stuff, but there's still a lot of work to be done before I can buy one that will reliably do many different household tasks. The Atlas platform that many of the competitors used in the DRC was developed by Boston Dynamics, who were subsequently bought by Google. So yes, they are definitely in this space. Maybe progress in humanoids will go faster just by virtue of the fact that we've got an extra decade of research to build on, but the journey from "works in a lab/demo, barely/slowly" to a viable commercial product is a long one. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzmMVHGNXvI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzmMVHGNXvI (sped-up highlights) [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwWm3HaDbnQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwWm3HaDbnQ (full 10-hour recording of competition live-stream)