Tech major Google is exploring the world of robotics again after its previous endeavor fizzled out due to a scandal surrounding its leader Andy Rubin – former chief of Android who was rumored to be given a severance package of $90 million.
Before his exit from the company, Google had acquired 6 startups in the line of robotics that was closed or sold off after the fiasco. The current robotics program therefore will focus on simple machines that can carry out and learn tasks by machine learning as per the report in the Times.
This development is a far cry from dog-like robots and human-type robots that were being developed by Boston Dynamics which was one of Google’s famous acquisitions that the parent company sold to Softbank in 2017.
Google confirmed that it is reviving the Robotics program which will now be led by Vincent Vanhoucke whose earlier stint was at Google Brain which focuses on research about artificial intelligence.
The team stated that its new creations will be able to learn skills on their own like sorting out objects in a bin based on their type. During this attempt with robotics, Google is focusing on developing robots that can do simple tasks.
One of its AI-led projects is associated with creating a mobile robot developed by startup Fetch which will enable navigation through spaces that it is not familiar with.
This form of knowledge could be very handy in a manufacturing organization as robots on the production floor can cut down costs incurred for maintaining a workforce.
Amazon presently uses robots to automate several sections of its distribution process. In its blog post about the robotics project, it has been mentioned that though robots are able to grasp objects and adapt themselves to learning from real-world situations they still need to be taught about how to pick up, manage and place different objects in an unstructured setting.