Top Robot Builders across the globe.

Google to create Army of Robots

Many people who are familiar with the story line of the Terminator series now make a comparison between Skynet and Google. For the people who aren’t familiar, Skynet is an artificial intellect which developed its own will and decided to destroy the man kind. For that purpose Skynet created an army of humanoid, flying and other robots called Terminators.
So, why is that “demonization” of Google? The answer is simple – the American company acquired 8 smaller companies that work in the field of robotics. And it just happened in the past few months. Although pretty far from the destructive Skynet nature, the attempt of Google to spread widely in more and more technological fields is obvious.
Now we will take a closer look over the companies that are a part of the Google Empire at present.

Boston Dynamics

The company was founded by former members of Massachusetts Institute of Technology – a team led by Marc Raibert. The company was born in 1992 and is focused on creating robots and software in order to recreate the human body and its abilities with mechanic parts. Boston Dynamics is probably the jewel in the Google’s “collection” of robotic companies. The engineers from Boston gave life of impressive “Terminators” like Atlas, a humanoid robot with high mobility, SquishBot, which is able to change its shape for moving through narrow places, and many others.

Schaft, Inc

This company is based in Tokyo and received some fame by winning the gold medal at Robotics Challenge Trial. This competition was held by DARPA (not a surprise at all, right?). The Japanese team created the most competitive machine, a 1.5 meters tall and 95 kg heavy robot able to walk and even climb stairs.

DeepMind Technologies

As the name suggests, the company is interested mainly in development of artificial intellect and brain, instead of building functional machines. Inventions of this company could probably be applied to Google’s search algorithm and engine or to any other field of interest of the global internet company.

Holomni

All available information for this company is just “Creators of high-tech wheels for omnidirectional motion.”. This sentence could be found on the Holomni non-active website where is also explained that the company “has stopped all external design work and product production” because of the acquisition by Google.

Bot & Dolly

This company has more artistic approach and makes robots for movies. Probably nobody believes that Google plans to invade the film industry, but it could reveal different applications for robots.

Meka Robotics

This company is also too busy to maintain more detailed website, stating that they’re “too busy building the robot revolution” after the acquisition by Google. Their activity could be best described by their flagship model – M1 Mobile Manipulator, a humanoid robot built in an attempt to achieve the agility of a human hand.

Redwood Robotics

Here we see exactly the same text as on the Meka Robotics website. The company is focused on creating agile robotic arms and was born by the combined efforts of Meka Robotics, SRI International, and Willow Garage.

Industrial Perception, Inc

Robots developed by this company are supposed to be used in industries and warehouses where different objects will be sorted and moved to different locations.