Re: Why did Google not buy "ROS"? (Was Re: FK and Jacobian calculation in RTT)

On 21 January 2014 20:11, Herman Bruyninckx <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Jan 2014, Sylvain Joyeux wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 11:19:24 AM Herman Bruyninckx wrote:
> >> Off topic: would anyone care to speculate on the importance of the
> >> observation that Google bought more or less all robotics companies in
> the
> >> US, _except_ the ROS-driven ones...?
> >
> > Google being a software company (and Rubin already being in the software
> > world), I personally believe that it is simply something they did not
> feel
> > they needed to acquire.
>
> My interpretation is that Google wants to focus on more "mechatronics"-like
> robotics, for which ROS has no added value, and the "Android" ecosystem
> indeed already has a lot more to offer.
>
> For me it is also very relevant that Rethink was _not_ bought; I presume
> because of the low "mechatronics" performance of its hardware... (compared
> to what companies like Boston Dynamics, Bot&Dolly, and Shaft can realise).
>
> All just speculations, of course :-)
>
>
Google didn't just buy mechatronics companies; they bought Bot & Dolly
(high-precision manipulator control) and Industrial Perception (vision).
However, Herman is right in that they bought several companies with
high-performance aspects and ignored those without. It seems to me that
they decided they already have a software infrastructure (whether it be
Android or ROS, which is, after all, open source so they can use it without
buying it), or can build one easily enough from what they have, and instead
focused on filling the gaps they need for their first target market (stated
as things like packaging), i.e. mechatronics, sensor processing and control.

I think that it's unlikely Google would use ROS, though. They want to
control the entire stack, which means using something they control. At the
most, they would fork ROS, but I can't see any benefit in forking what is
effectively a package manager instead of just taking the guts of the
packages they want and putting them into an Android framework.

Geoff

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