As Google continues to expands its robotics arm, the tech giant today made a big announcement in regards to its funding. Despite the two revolutionary robotics companies it acquired last year, Boston Dynamics and Schaft, currently competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge—a military-sponsored competition where robots are tasked to carry out a number of intricate assignments—Google said Boston Dynamics and Schaft will no longer accept DARPA money.
As Adrianne Jeffries reports, the decision seems to be mutual.
That doesn’t mean the two innovation houses want to work together, however. Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, "What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?" DARPA doesn’t want to give Google money because it wants to use its $2.7 billion budget to fund startups with scarce resources, not Goliath tech companies, and its investments are supposed to seed technology that can one day be purchased by the Pentagon for national defense, which Google is unlikely to play along with.
What's good with some affordable consumer robots, Google? Now that's something we can definitely get down with.
[via The Verge]
