Alphabet’s subsidiary Everyday Robots will no longer exist as a separate division, with team members and technology distributed to other divisions.
The parent company of Google does not close the first project to robotize everyday concerns, recalls The Verge, and this may indicate that, despite all the efforts of Alphabet, it still cannot move in the direction of robotics.
“Some of the technology and some of the equipment will be added to existing robotics teams within Google Research,” Denise Gamboa, director of marketing and communications for Everyday Robots, told Wired.
This is far from the first “belt tightening” at Alphabet. Google laid off about 12,000 employees. Including almost the entire staff of our own Area 120 incubator.
Another Alphabet Robotics company, Intrinsic, also suffered a staff cut of about 20% (about 40 employees). The company creates software for the control of industrial units.
The dissolution of the Everyday Robots project, launched in 2019 with the aim of developing robots that could help in home and office environments, appears in this context as one of the links in the global chain.
Ten years ago, Google began taking over robotics developers by buying many companies (including Boston Dynamics).
Officially, Alphabet assures that it will not give up efforts in the field of robotics, despite a series of difficult decisions.
But we see that the corporation is gradually disbanding the relevant teams, which may indicate the failure of attempts to create truly effective industrial and home robots.
At the same time, The Verge writes that prototypes of Everyday Robots – one-armed robots on wheels – have already been tested at Google offices since 2021, and in 2022 they were updated thanks to Google’s research in the field of artificial intelligence, which allowed them to process voice commands.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
