Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android

If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?

Google executives acknowledge that robotic vision is a “moonshot.” But it appears to be more realistic than Amazon’s proposed drone delivery service, which Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, revealed in a television interview the evening before one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Over the last half-year, Google has quietly acquired seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. And the engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones.

The company is tight-lipped about its specific plans, but the scale of the investment, which has not been previously disclosed, indicates that this is no cute science project.

At least for now, Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to several people with specific knowledge of the project.

A realistic case, according to several specialists, would be automating portions of an existing supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

Google has recently started experimenting with package delivery in urban areas with its Google Shopping service, and it could try to automate portions of that system. The shopping service, available in a few locations like San Francisco, is already making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and American Eagle Outfitters.

Perhaps someday, there will be automated delivery to the doorstep, which for now is dependent on humans.

“Like any moonshot, you have to think of time as a factor,” Mr. Rubin said. “We need enough runway and a 10-year vision.”

Mr. Rubin, the 50-year-old Google executive in charge of the new effort, began his engineering career in robotics and has long had a well-known passion for building intelligent machines. Before joining Apple Computer, where he initially worked as a manufacturing engineer in the 1990s, he worked for the German manufacturing company Carl Zeiss as a robotics engineer.

“I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Mr. Rubin said in a telephone interview. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”

He used the example of a windshield wiper that has enough “intelligence” to operate when it rains, without human intervention, as a model for the kind of systems he is trying to create. That is consistent with a vision put forward by the Google co-founder Larry Page, who has argued that technology should be deployed wherever possible to free humans from drudgery and repetitive tasks.

The veteran of a number of previous Silicon Valley start-up efforts and twice a chief executive, Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.

Earlier this year, Mr. Rubin stepped down as head of the company’s Android smartphone division. Since then he has convinced Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Mr. Page, that the time is now right for such a venture, and they have opened Google’s checkbook to back him. He declined to say how much the company would spend.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2013

An article on Wednesday about Google’s increasing investment in robotics, including the acquisition of technology companies related to the field, misspelled the name of one such acquisition, a small design firm that makes high-tech wheels. It is Holomni, not Holonomi.

Gadgetwise Blog: Insect Robots, Just in Time for Halloween

Remote-controlled cars, trucks and helicopters are common these days. Insects, on the other hand, are relatively new on the scene.

The Hexbug Scarab XL and Spider XL ($40 each, from www.hexbug.com) are big brother editions of their tiny button-cell counterparts, with many more features. The translucent plastic robots come in several colors. You can observe the fascinating gear-driven mechanics of each leg being activated to create motion.

Of the two, the spider, which is powered by AAA batteries, is the more sophisticated. It has an LED eye on a head that turns like a gun turret, allowing it to move in a complete circle. But the faster Scarab, which uses AA batteries, can pop from its back to its feet if it is placed upside down.

The remote control, powered by a single nine-volt battery, makes steering easy. It offers three forward speeds (slow, medium and fast) and one reverse speed. Its two channels allow multiple bugs to be operated independently or at the same time. The Scarab XL is in stores now, and the Spider XL is due out at the end of November.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated some information. The Spider XL uses AAA batteries, not AA batteries. The spider is also not currently available in stores, but is due out at the end of November.

Wearable Robots That Can Help People Walk Again

Mr. Abicca, a 17-year-old from San Diego, is essentially wearing a robot. His bionic suit consists of a pair of mechanical braces wrapped around his legs and electric muscles that do much of the work of walking. It is controlled by a computer on his back and a pair of crutches held in his arms that look like futuristic ski poles.

Since an accident involving earth-moving equipment three years ago that damaged his spinal cord, Mr. Abicca has been unable to walk on his own. The suit, made by a company called Ekso Bionics, is an effort to change that.

“It’s awesome — I love getting back up,” Mr. Abicca said before strapping on the legs during his recent visit to the company’s headquarters here. “Even just standing up straight is awesome.”

Ekso is one of several companies and research labs that are working on wearable robots made to help disabled people or to make the human body superhuman. In 2010, Raytheon released a suit for soldiers that is designed to reduce injuries from heavy lifting. And in Israel, a company called Argo Medical Technologies also makes a robotic suit to help paraplegics walk again.

Ekso says it was the first company to introduce a self-contained robotic suit, without any tethers to, say, a power supply. And though its suits for the disabled are now used only in rehabilitation centers, it is looking ahead to a day when they will let people take to the sidewalks, the shopping malls — and maybe even the woods.

Ekso, which was founded seven years ago by engineers in Berkeley, Calif., takes its name from the word exoskeleton, meaning a skeleton that is on the outside of the body. Originally financed by the military, the company collaborated with the University of California, Berkeley, and the military contractor Lockheed Martin on a device called the Hulc, which allows soldiers to carry up to 200 pounds of equipment over mixed terrain.

In February, Ekso started shipping exoskeletons that are being used in physical therapy to get people out of wheelchairs and using their lower bodies so their muscles do not deteriorate. About 15 rehabilitation centers in the United States are using the suits; they pay $140,000 for each one, along with a $10,000 annual service contract.

With a frame of aluminum and titanium, the bionic suit, called the Ekso, is battery-powered and weighs about 50 pounds. The suit is not yet at the point where a disabled person can use it independently. The batteries last three hours, at which point a physical therapist needs to replace them. Supervision also ensures that a patient does not fall over; the company said hundreds of people have walked in the suit, and none had fallen.

The Ekso suit is already going beyond just helping people walk again. The latest version released last month includes walking modes with different difficulty levels to challenge patients to make progress in their rehabilitation.

In the first mode, when a patient is first learning to walk with the suit, a physical therapist sets the step length and speed and presses a button on a computer to trigger each step. In the second mode, the patient can trigger a step with buttons on the crutches. And in the third, most advanced mode, once the patient has learned to maintain her balance in the suit, she can trigger the suit to take a step just by shifting her weight.

Patients learn to walk in the robotic suits surprisingly quickly, said Eythor Bender, chief executive of Ekso Bionics, who previously worked at Ossur, a company that made artificial limbs. “People who come in haven’t walked for years and years,” he said in an interview. “They are walking on their own in two days.”

Yoky Matsuoka, the former head of innovation at Google and now vice president for technology at Nest, which makes a smart thermostat, said the time was right for exoskeletons to graduate from science-fiction fantasy to commercial reality. Battery technology has improved significantly, materials like plastics and carbon fibers have gotten more lightweight and durable, and robotic systems have become easier to control, she said.

“In the last 10 years, the evolution of some of those materials and some technologies allows us to make robots that really stay human-safe and human-friendly,” Ms. Matsuoka said.

However, the cost of such devices for medical use could still be an obstacle, she said, because such specialized equipment sells in smaller quantities, making it difficult to bring the price down. She said that wider use by the military could help.

At some point, the Ekso suit may have to clear some regulatory hurdles. The current version of the suit is exempt from regulation, but if the company introduced one for personal use at home, it would probably have to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration, said John Tugwell, director of regulatory affairs at Ekso.

Ekso is hoping that the suits will, in the next few years, really start to go places.

Russ Angold, a founder and the chief technology officer of the company, predicted that exoskeletons, like today’s smartphones, would slim down and get more powerful and affordable, becoming part of everyday life.

“The dream at the end of the day is be able to walk into a sporting goods store, like an REI, and pick up an exoskeleton,” Mr. Angold said. “They’re like the jeans of the future.”