Google sells Boston Dynamics due to disagreements over robots

The last straw was the video of the Boston Dynamics, where a man pokes a stick of an Atlas robot

Google has offered for sale the robot company Boston Dynamics. According to rumors, now negotiations are underway with Toyota , but the deal has not yet closed.

Boston Dynamics develops stunning two-legged and four-legged robots. For example, the humanoid robot Atlas repeatedly hit the pages of Geektimes , as well as the four-legged BigDog .
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Google is new to this field. She bought Boston Dynamics along with nine other robotic companies in 2013, but didn’t know what to do with them. For the first time, Andy Rubin was appointed to lead, which gave companies complete freedom: do whatever you like, do the same as before, they told them.

But after the departure of Rubin in October 2014, the situation has changed.

The tension between Boston Dynamics and Google originated in 2014, but the last straw was a video published in February of this year, where a man kicks the humanoid Atlas robot and in every way prevents him from fulfilling his duties. Shortly after its release, Bloomberg published an article that Amazon and the Toyota Research Institute considered potential buyers of Boston Dynamics.



As reported, recently, several employees of Boston Dynamics went to work at the Toyota Research Institute . Now the whole company can go this way. Sources call this “friendly shopping,” given the close ties between companies.

Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert (Marc Raibert) is a longtime friend of the head of the Toyota Research Institute robotic division and program director at DARPA Gill Pratt. They worked together in the MIT Robotics Laboratory since 1986, then Raibert founded his company, Boston Dynamics, in 1992.

Boston Dynamics initially designed robots with an eye on military applications, participating in various DARPA programs. In turn, Google was never interested in military robots, but allowed Boston Dynamics to keep the existing contracts with DARPA.

After Rubin left, Google began to put more pressure on Boston Dynamics regarding the release of robots for the consumer market. They even set a plan to prepare a prototype of such a robot by 2020, but Boston Dynamics never set it as its goal. The new plan meant the abandonment of previous developments.


^{Spot Robot from Boston Dynamics}

"In the end, we all felt isolated between us and them - we were not part of Google, we were some kind of separate object," said a former employee of Boston Dynamics.

The tension was increasing. And then that video appeared .

“There were rave reviews in the tech press,” said Courtney Hohne, communications director at Google, “but we also began to notice negative discussions about how terrible it is that robots are ready to take jobs from people.” The director of communications asked Google X employees to distance themselves from this video and not comment on it.

This was the last straw. Contradictions Boston Dynamics and Google manifested themselves clearly. Perhaps as part of the Japanese corporation Boston Dynamics will be able to more effectively continue their research, rather than concentrate on the release of a commercial product.