Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by vitobcn on Saturday December 14, 2013 @02:35AM (#6905037)

From [1]:

    Google bought seven robotics companies in the past six months -
    Schaft, Industrial Perception, Meka,
    Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss and Holomni -

[1] : http://allthingsd.com/20131203/google-acquired-seven-robotic...

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by kken on Saturday December 14, 2013 @03:01AM (#6905091)

http://schaft-inc.jp/

http://www.industrial-perception.com/

http://mekabot.com/

http://redwoodrobotics.com/

http://www.botndolly.com/

http://www.autofuss.com/

http://www.holomni.com/

The common themes I see are:

- Movie industry

- Anthropomorphic robots

This is not aimed at utility applications, but seems to head into the human-machine-interface (HMI) direction.

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by dave809 on Saturday December 14, 2013 @11:14AM (#6906014)

I remember watching this awesome video from Bot & Dolly a few weeks ago, "Box" http://vimeo.com/75260457

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by kineticfocus on Saturday December 14, 2013 @04:37AM (#6905226)

With all these companies listed I'm surprised Willow Garage didn't join up with Google; given that the founder was a googler.

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by krschultz on Saturday December 14, 2013 @04:45PM (#6907240)

In effect, they did. Willow Garage was restructured into Redwood Robotics. Google purchased Redwood Robotics. There are certainly lots of messy details, but the key projects (ROS & OpenCV) and the engineers from Willow Garage are now at Google.

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by mturmon on Saturday December 14, 2013 @02:53AM (#6905071)

Thanks.

Isn't this list of acquisitions tilted towards mechanics and hardware for mobility? And less towards perception, intelligence, and planning? Do they think they have the latter areas covered in-house?

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