What Google Is Really Doing With All Those Robot Companies

Redwood Robotics for robot arms

Holomni for robot wheels

Bot & Dolly for robotics cameras

Boston Dynamics for creepy and cool mobile robots

DeepMind Technologies for artificial intelligence

Meka Robotics for humanoid robots

Industrial Perception for computer vision (which may or may not be for robotics)

While we know Google has interest in self-driving cars, the robot end-game is unclear. Sure, you can build an army of C-3POs, but for what?

Well, robots are excellent at repetitive tasks, like changing the settings on millions of computers so that they have Google.com as their home page and Google as their default search engine. Would these Google Robots invade homes to make the change or would Google offer it as a service? Send us your computer and our robots will "fix" them.

No one knows. Until then, I offer you the comic guesswork above. Read more...