Google confirmed late on Friday that it has completed the purchase of Boston Dynamics, an engineering firm that designs robots for the Pentagon. The company has made a reputation for creating some most advanced walking machines in existence.
This is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired; yet, nobody can be certain as to their plans. The internet giant has even tasked Andy Rubin, who lead development of the Android OS, to run the new robotics efforts. Speculators assume that Google is creating a fleet of autonomous systems capable of delivering packages or sorting warehouses. Which would match the other robot companies, which were pioneering work in robot arms and computer vision, that were also acquired.
Boston Dynamics is best known for the BigDog, a quadrupedal robot that became famous on the internet through a Youtube video. That design has been refined into a robot known as Cheetah, which is able to reach a running speed of 46.7 kph.
[source: New York Times]
