The answer seems to be "not very much". Google bought all those robotics companies but didn't get them to work together. All the companies are still in their original locations. Nobody has a product. Even Bot and Dolly, which had a product, no longer seems to be selling it. Boston Dynamics is being sold because they don't play well with others.
The whole robotics exercise seems to have been a hobby of Andy Rubin, and when he left, nobody had a clue what to do. Google/Alphabet, through mismanagement, may have added negative value to the robotics industry. Google's secrecy here seems to be more about hiding management failure than protecting intellectual property.
Martin Buehler, the brains behind BigDog, is now at Disney, and I expect we'll see more mobile robots there. Disney has wanted this for years; around 2000, they hired Danny Hillis to work on theme park robots. They got some improvements to their anamatronics, and a dino robot that pulls a cart but gets its balance from the cart wheels.
The next killer app in robotics is probably really good bin-picking. Kiva's mobile platforms can bring the shelf to the picker, but a human still takes the thing out of one bin and puts it into another. Amazon is working on solutions to that.
After reading "Google parent Alphabet ushers in 'fiscal discipline era'"[1], it's likely that Google/Alphabet will effectively be out of robotics shortly, after trashing most of the R&D startups in the field. Nobody they acquired is 2 years from making big bucks. Workers will be, as previously threatened, reallocated to other parts of the business. Probably related to ads; that's still 94% of revenue.
This is discouraging. It's the acquire-trash-dump thing Paul Allen was notorious for.
The answer seems to be "not very much". Google bought all those robotics companies but didn't get them to work together. All the companies are still in their original locations. Nobody has a product. Even Bot and Dolly, which had a product, no longer seems to be selling it. Boston Dynamics is being sold because they don't play well with others.
The whole robotics exercise seems to have been a hobby of Andy Rubin, and when he left, nobody had a clue what to do. Google/Alphabet, through mismanagement, may have added negative value to the robotics industry. Google's secrecy here seems to be more about hiding management failure than protecting intellectual property.
Martin Buehler, the brains behind BigDog, is now at Disney, and I expect we'll see more mobile robots there. Disney has wanted this for years; around 2000, they hired Danny Hillis to work on theme park robots. They got some improvements to their anamatronics, and a dino robot that pulls a cart but gets its balance from the cart wheels.
The next killer app in robotics is probably really good bin-picking. Kiva's mobile platforms can bring the shelf to the picker, but a human still takes the thing out of one bin and puts it into another. Amazon is working on solutions to that.