The H+ shift of Google (Part 3/4: Robotics)

After years of acquiring companies mainly in the IT domain, Google focused in recent months on robotics domain.

Google has indeed bought the eight major companies in the robotics domain in the world:

• Schaft Inc. (build humanoid robot),


• Industrial Perception inc. (use computer vision to better understand what they are looking at and handle non-standard situations),


• Redwood Robototics and Mekka Robotics (make humanoid bots and robotic arms),


• Holomni (make sophisticated wheels),


• Bot & Dolly and Autofuss (make immersive visuals for movies such as Gravity, and use of assembly line robots).


• The last one was on December 2013: Boston Dynamics, which is known for its robots such as BigDog, a rough-terrain robot that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads, the 29 mile-per-hour fastest legged Cheetah, and an agile anthropomorphic robot known as Atlas.

The engineer at the head of this newly created Robotics Division of Google is M.Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software.

By adding proprietary solutions already owned by Google today to its recent acquisitions, this company could create robots able to interact with humans and react to the real world ecosystem in a few months.

And it is obvious that huge synergies exist between health, artificial intelligence and robotics domains.

To echo all these future projects, Google recently decided to rent a huge military zone of 350.000m² belonging to US Navy, Hangar-One of Mosffett Federal, near Silicon Valley, which is composed of three warehouses and two roads, to have space to test all its future aerospace and robotics projects.