Poor blog post but interesting topic. Sebastian Thrun of Stanford works (was working?) at Google. So they have the expertise to work on robotics if they want to.
Peter Norvig is director of research at google,
he coauthored ai a modern approach, and was previously head of computers/robots at nasa. They have robotics talent already at google
So making a mobile OS and having image recognition technology makes Google likely to be at the center of the robotics industry?
It seems like a stretch.
larry page has stated many times his goal for google is to create ai. What robotics lacks is computer vision technology more than anything else, and it's not so far fetched that google (or microsoft/yahoo/ibm) would have the most advanced computer vision technology if they chose to try (which they clearly are doing with google similar images / google goggles).