Re:What's going on with Google robotics?
by Animats on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @04:06PM
(#10542504)
It takes money to do things in robotics. It took $125 million in DARPA funding to get to Big Dog. It took entire CS departments at big name schools with tech support from auto companies (Stanford's VW was made computer-drivable for them by VW) to win the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.
You can't do this on YCombinator-scale peanuts. That's what academic robotics looked like for decades, and progress was very, very slow.
It's possible they would be better off financing a VC/acquisition arm than hiring another 5k employees to be creative 'intrapeneuers'. Or some other model not yet popularized (such as the Valve decentralized approach or some shared ownership scheme).