
What's going on with Google robotics? - e15ctr0n
http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-going-on-with-google-robotics-2015-11
======
aresant
I've seen this movie before.

Andy is a visionary.

He left Apple to found Danger which was one of the "genesis" products that led
to the smartphone era. (1)

He made the next huge leap with Android and almost failed until Google showed
up to help him fully execute his vision under their stewardship.

After Android became a very mature business in its own right what to do with
the visionary founder?

The article states that "Page is interested in robots" \- can you imagine if
Larry Page came to you and said "Hey how about you literally build robots all
day. You could be Tony Stark and here's $100m to get you started. We'll change
the world!"

It's a hard to turn down offer, Rubin accepted and tried to recapture the
magic pursuing somebody else's vision.

But it's damn tough to be a founder / visionary under somebody else's thumb,
especially when you're set for life financially.

That's a story that never works out, but is played out again and again in
technical acquisitions as big organizations attempt to find a place for
founders.

(1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_\(company\))

(2)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google)

~~~
dmix
Innovation seems to work best under threat of poverty. Because it tends to
push founders to build things with a least some near-term practicality that is
of economic value to some party.

If you have $100m in the bank then the only primal motivation for a goal "of
creating consumer robot technology by 2020" is articles like this one by
BusinessInsider questioning what value has been created.

The arbitrary deadline set at the beginning (2020) could be another
motivation, but that could probably be pushed back and the project refinanced
because hey innovation is hard.

~~~
jessriedel
I'd say "promise of future status and material rewards" rather than "threat of
poverty". The threat of poverty strongly induces very risk adverse behavior.
One of the necessary conditions for a country to produce a silicon valley is
that they have sufficient material wealth that poverty isn't a risk.

But yes, once you have the money and the fame, you probably won't be as
driven.

~~~
antsar
I can't comment on how it works for companies as a whole, but it has been
shown that individuals are more strongly motivated by the desire to avoid a
loss than the desire to gain something.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion)

~~~
jessriedel
I'm familiar with loss aversion, and it's really not relevant here. (Maybe it
would be if you could fall in status by not innovating, etc.)

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Animats
Google's robot effort is scattered. They have two good humanoid projects,
Schaft, which is a spinoff of Tokyo University, and Boston Dynamics, which is
a spinoff of MIT. They're still located near Tokyo and Boston; they haven't
been brought together. BD probably has better control and Schaft has better
actuators for human-sized robots, and I'd expected a new machine with the best
of the two technologies by now. Not happening.

If they try to move those groups to Mountain View, they'll probably lose most
of the people, especially on the BD side, where the team is older. Raibert,
the Boston Dynamics CEO, is at retirement age. Boston Dynamics will need new
leadership soon.

Google could put Anthony Levandowski in charge. He's been with the Google
self-driving car effort, and he's an original thinker. He's the one who built
a self-driving motorcycle in 2003.

They need an intermediate goal, a minimum viable product, if you will. Outside
of industrial robots and vacuum cleaners, no autonomous robotic product makes
money. Except for self-driving cars, none look likely to do so in the near
future. The most promising near term applications are military, and Google
doesn't want to do those.

~~~
dunkelheit
Seeing the work of these brilliant roboticists disappear inside google without
even a consumer product to show is sad. But the thought of them building
robots for military is just scary.

~~~
argonaut
As opposed to languishing inside a small company that is strained for
resources?

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Schwolop
At the risk of derailing the post, I have a relevant question for the Hacker
News hivemind: how would someone like me get this job? (i.e. Andy Rubin's
former position)

I've got a Ph.D. in autonomous robotics from the best place in Australia to
have earned one. I started a consumer robotics company that exploded rapidly
in a cloud of useful lessons learned. I then moved into product development
consulting in order to understand the full product development lifecycle. And
I'm now also the CTO of a small startup building an OS for if-this-then-that
(and more) control of hardware and software devices, initially targeting
Escape Room developers.

On the other hand, I'm only 31, and given how long I spent in academia, my
paid employment experience is only about five years, including a 20-month
post-doc.

My experience isn't all that atypical. I've met plenty of equally ambitious
and credentialled people, most of them entrepreneurs too. Imagining that this
sort of role is the ideal end-game for people like me, what should we do
now/next/later?

I spend a lot of time looking at the history of people I admire and might want
to emulate, and in almost all cases there seems to be a launching point where
they make an enormous leap into an amazing role. I can't help but assume
someone noticed them and plucked them out of obscurity (e.g. I'd not heard of
Danger, or even Android before it was acquired) and into a high-level role. So
the big question then - how to get noticed? Paraphrasing Bill Watterson, how
do I find the right place to hang-out so that I'm already there when the right
time comes along?

~~~
nostrademons
Go build a consumer robotics startup that takes off and embarrasses Google,
and then they will either buy you and put you in charge of their robotics
efforts, or exit the market. Either way, you win.

Big companies respond better to threats than to talent. Make 'em irrelevant
and they'll want you; if you try to make them want you, you'll just make
yourself irrelevant.

~~~
Schwolop
Well said. Thanks!

------
MrQuincle
I think Business Insider misses the point. There will be many robots on the
market in the coming times. Diversifying your portfolio does make sense. Also,
Google does have focus in the sense that they make consumer products.

If I would work there, I'd create several robots for consumers:

* robots that can carry stuff, and yes, that means also staircases (one of my interns is doing that right now)

* robots that can clean floors properly, vacuuming, scrubbing, but also cleaning themselves! (we're doing this professionally)

* robots that can clean windows, might be quadcopters (we're not that far, we're just spraying paint for now)

Regretfully, robots are difficult to sell, so that's why I'm currently
creating a revenue stream around indoor localization (which is what we solve
all the time for autonomous robots). However, as Google they have plenty of
time (5 years) and resources, so they can built awesome stuff.

Business Insider is just impatient.

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KamiCrit
Man I feel pretty bad for Boston Dynamics. They went from having a bright and
glowing future with Government/Military contracts to being dimmed down by
Google. They really seem like a company that shouldn't be tamed.

~~~
gallamine
It is hugely disappointing to see what, likely, is them getting run into the
ground. It almost seems self-serving that Rubin would buy all these companies,
who would have been competitors for his new incubator, shackle them to Google
and then leave them in the lurch to go do his own thing.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
This is also what I think is going on here. Google wealthy enough to buy robot
companies that might compete with its internal offerings.

The same way Google looked at internal OpenMoko efforts and decided to just
buy Android. Now the problem is Android is tied to company that gets all of
its revenue through advertising. I just saw an article about how typical
Android apps query location thousands of times a day to sell to advertisers.
Google will never implement an Apple-like "Enable location" prompt. This is
their bread and butter.

This is also why I think a Google robot will fail. It'll be too tied to
advertising revenues and other privacy affecting services. People will be wary
about the "spying" robot in their home and businesses and will opt for a
competitors product.

~~~
fharper1961
Google has added an "Enable location" prompt in Android 6 (aka Marshmallow).

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I have Marshmallow on my 6P and have never seen it. Is this on by default for
end users? Or so well hidden option that guarantees no one will ever use it?

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jimrandomh
> "The technology pieces we have are incredible," says one member of Google's
> robots team. "We just have to commit to a particular direction to go in and
> focus."

A more positive framing of this would be that they're doing development
bottom-up: develop good pieces first, then figure out what to assemble them
into later. Given that Google hasn't been in robotics very long, and that
their goal is to launch a consumer robot "before 2020", this strategy seems
reasonable.

------
IBM
The same thing that has plagued Google for years: institutional ADD.

~~~
moron4hire
Unfortunately, it's an extremely fine line between trying to avoid such a
thing and crushing creativity entirely.

~~~
dmix
This is under the assumption that fostering that type of creativity internally
is a valuable model in the first place.

It's possible they would be better off financing a VC/acquisition arm than
hiring another 5k employees to be creative 'intrapeneuers'. Or some other
model not yet popularized (such as the Valve decentralized approach or some
shared ownership scheme).

~~~
Animats
It takes money to do things in robotics. It took $125 million in DARPA funding
to get to Big Dog. It took entire CS departments at big name schools with tech
support from auto companies (Stanford's VW was made computer-drivable for them
by VW) to win the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.

You can't do this on YCombinator-scale peanuts. That's what academic robotics
looked like for decades, and progress was very, very slow.

------
smegel
> as it tries to meet a goal of creating consumer robot technology by 2020

Wouldn't a self-driving car qualify as a "robot"?

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melted
I'm confused. Why would anyone expect that an advertising company would
actually have a clue what they want to do with robotics? I think the main idea
with acquisitions in robotics space was to keep Andy around, and to create yet
another PR bubble, much like with Glass or autonomous cars. But then Andy left
and it turned out that shit's hard. Whoop dee do. Time to switch to some other
distraction.

~~~
raldi
Crazy! It would be like a PayPal founder believing he'd have a clue about how
to build an electric car, or a rocket ship.

~~~
melted
No, it would be like expecting PayPal to build a spaceship or an electric car.

~~~
raldi
I see -- it would be like if the same parent company thought it could
successfully run, say, GEICO, Dairy Queen, and Fruit of the Loom.

~~~
melted
You're reaching, but I'll oblige. It'd be like Berkshire Hathaway told Dairy
Queen or GEICO to build a commercially viable robot.

Google basically runs two things profitably: Ads and Android (the latter in
part because of ads). Neither of which makes anything hardware related. All
phones are made by other companies, and when they tried to run one, they were
losing $700M/yr.

~~~
raldi
Come on. That's like saying Apple only runs one thing profitably, consumer
electronics. YouTube is wildly different from Google Fiber which is nothing
like the Play store, which is nothing like web search.

