Google puts Boston Dynamics robotics unit up for sale.
The video, published to YouTube on Feb. 23, was awe- inspiring and scary. A two- legged humanoid robot trudges through the snow, somehow maintaining its balance. Another r obot with two arms and pads for hands crouches down and lifts a brown box and delicately places it on a shelf — then somehow stays upright while a human tries to push it over with a hockey stick. A third robot topples over and clambers back to its feet with ease.
Tens of millions of people viewed the video over the next few weeks. Google Inc. and the division responsible for the video, Boston Dynamics, were seemingly pushing the frontier in robot technology.
But behind the scenes a more pedestrian drama was playing out. Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans.
Possible acquirers i nclude the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon. com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centres, according to one person. Google and Toyota declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to requests f or comment.
Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics spearheaded by Andy Rubin, former chief of the Android division. Rubin left the company in October 2014.
Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader.
At the heart of Replicant’s trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit’s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term.
Tensions between Boston Dynamics and the rest of the Replicant group spilled into open view within Google, when written minutes of a Nov. 11 meeting and several subsequent emails were inadvertently published to an online forum that was accessible to other Google workers. These documents were made available to Bloomberg News by a Google employee who spotted them.
The November meeting was run by Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet CEO Larry Page and former Google senior vice- president, who was temporarily i n charge of the Replicant group. In the meeting, Rosenberg said, “we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30- plus per cent of our resources on things that take 10 years,” and that “there’s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and ( that) needs to be a few years.”
In December, Google announced that Replicant had been folded into Google’s advanced research group, Google X. In a private allhands meeting around that time, Astro Teller, the head of Google X, told Replicant employees that if robotics aren’t the practical solution to problems that Google was trying to solve, they would be reassigned to work on other things, according to a person who was at that meeting.
Boston Dynamics, though, was never folded into Google X and was instead put up for sale. After the division’s latest robot video was posted to YouTube, in February, Google’s publicrelations team expressed discomfort that Alphabet would be associated with a push into humanoid robotics. Their subsequent emails were also published to the internal online forum and became visible to all Google employees.
“There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” wrote Courtney Hohne, a director of communications at Google and the spokeswoman for Google X.