Google published research this week detailing how its software enables robots to learn from one another. To demonstrate, the company’s scientists showed videos featuring robotic arms whirling inside its labs.
Google’s robotics group built those machines and wanted to sell them to manufacturers, warehouse operators and others.
However, executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc nixed the plan because it failed chief executive officer Larry Page’s “toothbrush test,” a requirement that the company only ship products used daily by billions of people, according to people familiar with the situation.
The verdict came at about the end of last year, just before the Google robotics unit moved to X, Alphabet’s research lab.
Roboticists who worked on the project voiced frustration with Google’s caution, echoing sentiment at other divisions outside Google’s core Internet business, like its self-driving car unit, which display technical prowess, but have yet to ship products.
“It was still a prototype, but it had a lot of advantages,” James Kuffner, chief technology officer at the Toyota Research Institute who previously led Google’s robotics unit, said about the arm. “The team worked really hard. If it had been entirely up to me I would have shipped it, but it was not.”
Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds said there are no plans to sell the machines.
“We’re using them to do basic research on how machine learning might help robots be a bit more coordinated — a promising field of research, but still very early days,” Freidenfelds said.
Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for Alphabet’s X, declined to comment.
Google built about 50 of the robotic arms capable of lifting about 4.5kg each, according to one person familiar with the project.
They were designed by Meka Robotics, a start up Google acquired in 2013, according to another person.
The unreleased arm is another sign of trouble at Google’s rudderless robotics division. A slew of start-ups joined in 2013, thanks to an acquisition spree by former Android chief Andy Rubin. He left the following year and Google ported the robotics teams into X for a reboot. Earlier this year, Google moved to sell the largest of these groups, Boston Dynamics, after tensions arose internally.
Google has not sold the unit.
When Google considers releasing a product, it has to protect its brand, which is among the most valuable in the world, Kuffner said.
“There’s risk associated with something that could be sub-par,” he added. “No executive is going to get it right all the time. It’s a hard balance and a hard line to walk because on the one hand you want to launch and ship early, but on the other hand you want to protect your brand.”
Although Alphabet abandoned shipping the robotic arms, it has not put them to rest completely. Its latest papers, a collaboration between researchers at several Alphabet units, demonstrate a groundbreaking technique called “collective learning” applied to robotics. After the fleet of arms were trained on Google’s algorithms to open a certain type of door, for instance, they were able to replicate the action with doors they had never seen before.
“The skills learned by the robots are still relatively simple — pushing objects and opening doors,” the researchers wrote, “but by learning such skills more quickly and efficiently through collective learning, robots might in the future acquire richer behavioral repertoires that could eventually make it possible for them to assist us in our daily lives.”
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