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

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Geoffrey Biggs wrote:

> 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),

But they can not _control_ is, as they do with Android, which is, on the
surface, also "open source". (But does not _operate_ like a real open
source project.)

> 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.

That is also what I expect to happen...

> Geoff

Herman
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