Google’s Robot Retreat: Puts Boston Dynamic Up For Sale

Google's ambitious project on robotics seems to be on the termination route as the tech giant plans to put an end to the high-profile robotic experiments.

As per a Bloomberg report, the company has decided to sell Boston Dynamics, its flagship robot maker, which may be acquired by Toyota, a division of Toyota Motor Corp. or Amazon Inc.

The news comes in the wake of a video that went viral last month. It showed a bipedal robot called Atlas enduring a stress-test with flying colors while a man tries to beat it up. It garnered sympathy and also aroused concerns about robots taking away jobs from humans.

But people can put their fears to rest as the parent company of Google, Alphabet, is not very satisfied with the performance of its robotics arm. The company has realized that Boston Dynamics cannot produce a marketable product in the near future and will not be able to generate revenue as well. So, it is best to put it up for sale.

This is not really surprising as reports suggest that Google has a poor track record in this area. The multinational technology giant had acquired around a dozen of robotic companies in a bid to explore the emerging frontier but it failed miserably. Most of them shut down and Andy Rubin, the man who headed the robot team at Google also left.

It seems that the vision of Google and the working style of robot companies failed to match each other. The former wanted to build affordable and salable versions of automatons, but the robot engineers were only interested in experimenting so that they could come up with cool stuff.

Well, as of now, the honeymoon seems to be over, which is quite disheartening for robot enthusiasts and fans. The only consolation is that Google is still very much involved in its self-driving cars.