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Comment by vitobcn | Hacker News Reader

From [1]:

    Google bought seven robotics companies in the past six months -
    Schaft, Industrial Perception, Meka,
    Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss and Holomni -

[1] : http://allthingsd.com/20131203/google-acquired-seven-robotic...

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http://schaft-inc.jp/

http://www.industrial-perception.com/

http://mekabot.com/

http://redwoodrobotics.com/

http://www.botndolly.com/

http://www.autofuss.com/

http://www.holomni.com/

The common themes I see are:

- Movie industry

- Anthropomorphic robots

This is not aimed at utility applications, but seems to head into the human-machine-interface (HMI) direction.

With all these companies listed I'm surprised Willow Garage didn't join up with Google; given that the founder was a googler.

In effect, they did. Willow Garage was restructured into Redwood Robotics. Google purchased Redwood Robotics. There are certainly lots of messy details, but the key projects (ROS & OpenCV) and the engineers from Willow Garage are now at Google.

I remember watching this awesome video from Bot & Dolly a few weeks ago, "Box" http://vimeo.com/75260457

Thanks.

Isn't this list of acquisitions tilted towards mechanics and hardware for mobility? And less towards perception, intelligence, and planning? Do they think they have the latter areas covered in-house?

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