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"  Robots Are Leaving the Factory and Coming to Your Home Google bought into robotics at a crucial point in their development. Autonomous systems are smart and tough enough to sense the world around them and navigate through it. Don&amp;#039;t believe it? Just look at the recent slate of automobile sensors that meld collision-avoidance and lane-keeping sensors to drive a car by autopilot. The next step, experts say, is what the robots can do when they get to their destinations. &amp;quot;Mobile manipulation is where it&amp;#039;s at today,&amp;quot; says Steve DiAntonio, director of business opportunities at the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon, meaning machines that are as precise as factory robots but are free to move about. Car factories are stocked with powerful, precise robotic arms that assemble cars with uncanny speed and delicacy. Bringing that to our world\u2014to our streets, nursing homes, warehouses\u2014is the next big step in robotics. And Google bought its way into this future. This Is the Biggest Acquisition in Google&amp;#039;s Robot-Buying Spree Google has bought eight robotics companies in the last half-year, a clear sign it plans to enter the market. This is no exploratory idea, like Jeff Bezos testing drone delivery for Amazon. Google means to produce products\u2014and profit\u2014and its plan should bear fruit within a few years of development.  And by buying Boston Dynamics, the mega-company owns some revolutionary hardware. BD builds two- and four-legged robots that can correct their balance, scan their surroundings with cameras and laser radar, and act with autonomy. From building robot mules to providing the base to work from for contestants at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of mobile robotics. Its products, primarily created for the Pentagon, push the edge of what a robot can do in the human world. And this will continue. This Will Be a Sea Change for Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics is not a commercial-robot vendor. It is a development shop. BD has created most of its robots for the Defense Research Project Agency, DARPA, which has a culture of daring, risky research. DARPA projects have real goals, but they are not meant to produce a product. Rather, the projects are meant to incubate breakthroughs that could be useful in the military world. A new focus on making commercial products will change the culture at Boston Dynamics, even if its new boss is Google, with Google&amp;#039;s reputation for allowing its employees to pursue odd or simply interesting lines of research. The acquisition may spur greater advances, and Google may keep a blue-sky team of advanced researchers working on next-gen products. Unfortunately for fans of radically advanced robots, though, we might not get to see some of those advances for a while. Where DARPA was open about sharing videos of marvelous new machines, Google might be more tight-lipped now that it will own the patents. Relax: Robots Are Not Here to Hurt You We&amp;#039;re not sure what uses these robots will have in the future, but chances are they will be benevolent. Nevertheless, being confronted with increasingly autonomous robotics systems can lead people to incredible levels of paranoia. That&amp;#039;s clear from the doom-filled headlines that accompany any new video of a humanoid or animallike robot from Boston Dynamics, and from such hyperbolic commentary as Shepard Ambellas&amp;#039;s, who writes that the rise of robotics &amp;quot;will essentially lead us toward human extinction.&amp;quot; More likely, robots will first make life marginally better for a select few. That number will grow as the technology matures and more robots are programmed to help us do the things we don&amp;#039;t want to do\u2014or physically cannot. The thing that can stop mobile robots in their tracks is the irrational rejection of the very idea. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a9895/google-buys-boston-dynamics-4-things-you-should-know-16274851/>