Meanwhile, Honda[1] and SRI [2] are catching up. Boston Dynamics' Atlas is too much like Big Dog; it weighs 700 pounds and uses hydraulics. Schaft is all-electric; they use liquid cooling so they can run the motors really hard if they have to. (That's how Tesla does it, too.) Boston Dynamics is working on better hydraulics, but electric motors are going to win this one for anything smaller than a pony.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/honda-... [2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/durus-...

It is hugely disappointing to see what, likely, is them getting run into the ground. It almost seems self-serving that Rubin would buy all these companies, who would have been competitors for his new incubator, shackle them to Google and then leave them in the lurch to go do his own thing.

This is also what I think is going on here. Google wealthy enough to buy robot companies that might compete with its internal offerings.

The same way Google looked at internal OpenMoko efforts and decided to just buy Android. Now the problem is Android is tied to company that gets all of its revenue through advertising. I just saw an article about how typical Android apps query location thousands of times a day to sell to advertisers. Google will never implement an Apple-like "Enable location" prompt. This is their bread and butter.

This is also why I think a Google robot will fail. It'll be too tied to advertising revenues and other privacy affecting services. People will be wary about the "spying" robot in their home and businesses and will opt for a competitors product.

Google has added an "Enable location" prompt in Android 6 (aka Marshmallow).

I have Marshmallow on my 6P and have never seen it. Is this on by default for end users? Or so well hidden option that guarantees no one will ever use it?

> a company that shouldn't be tamed

I don't know -- a next-gen, armed BigDog is kind of scary.