With global sales up by 2% last year, according to the International Federation of Robotics, it is hard to think robotics’ time has arrived.
But after more than 30 years’ research, that time is certainly nearer than it was to judge by US-listed internet search engine provider Google’s acquisition this week of Boston Dynamics for its hardware. (Immediately before the acquisition, Boston Dynamics transferred its DI-Guy software product line to VT MÄK, a simulation software vendor previously acquired by defence contractor Vision Technologies Systems.)
Spun out from US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1992 after research by Marc Raibert through the 1980s to develop the hardware and software to move robots, Boston Dynamics has been one of thousands to have left the institute. The institute produces more patent applications than any other single university in the world, with 179 in 2011, and its active companies created by its alumni bring in aggregate revenue of about $2 trillion – the equivalent of the 11th-largest economy in the world.
But work on robotics is undertaken at labs around the world, and Google has apparently been following and buying some of the best (see box below). Earlier, Google, according to research by news provider New York Times, reportedly bought seven other robotics companies this year, including Japan-based Schaft. Yuto Nakanish, chief executive of Schaft, had been working on similar problems since the 1980s after spinning out from Tokyo University.
But this part of the economy has received relatively little venture capital, instead most of the research has been driven by established corporations, such as Honda, as well as government-funded research at universities and laboratories.
Google’s other acquisitions in robotics are notable for having no public venture capital backers, instead seeming to rely on public grants and commercial contracts. Boston Dynamics received nine awards from the US government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme, such as for a robot to paint radio towers and a robotic mule to carry equipment.
Blog Hizook’s list of VC Funding for Robotics in 2012, showed robotics companies raised about $220m, once readers’ comments had uncovered Anki’s $12m series A round and Finland-based ZenRobotics’ €13m ($17m), a similar amount to the year before but less than one deal in consumer or enterprise internet companies, such as Google-backed Surveymonkey. (The blog left off any funding that was under $1m, such as Double Robotics’ $400,000 from YCombinator, YCVC, and Grishin.
Instead, Hizook noted “innumerable crowd-funded robotics campaigns launched new companies; and robotics-specific grants to academia seemed to be on the up, [for example, US government’s National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Robotics Initiative (NRI) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (Darpa) Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3)] and ARM Humanoid programs”.
This is reminiscent of the early years of personal computing from the 1950s on as the power of computing hardware increased, laid out in Moore’s Law, which said back in 1965 the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years – for a nice paper see here. Then, discussion at Stanford Research Institute (subsequently spun off in 1970 from the eponymous university and renamed SRI International) under Doug Engelbart and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Sail) under John McCarthy turned on whether computing would augment humans or create an artificial intelligence that could go beyond.
As quantum computing power and machine-learning algorithms re-open this debate as augmenters or replacements and which groups will reap the rewards on the investment into robotics.
But just as tax-payers, via government agencies, were replaced as the primary source of money funding for personal computing and sparking what venture capitalist and former Intel executive John Doerr called the “largest legal creation of wealth on the planet”, so robotics is moving outside of the labs as corporate venturing units, angel investors and VC firms become more active. At this year’s Global Corporate Venturing Symposium, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, the corporate venturing unit of the eponymous Germany-based industrial company, sponsored the robotics and industrials sector roundtable.
In June 2012, Dmitry Grishin, one of the co-founders of Russia-based technology company Mail.Ru, set up Grishin Robotics, which it said was the first global investment company focused on the robotics industry – see more on Grishin here and our interview here and a Big Deal analysis on the congruence of deals at that time here.
Google’s eponymous corporate venturing unit has been beefing up its staff in the area (admittedly it is adding everywhere judging by its 2013 reportreleased this week). Last month, Google Ventures hired Shanna Tellerman and David Munichiello as investment partners and backed Building Robotics’, a US-based creator of software that allows people to control office temperature, $1.1m seed funding.
Tellerman was the founder of Sim Ops Studios (Wild Pockets), a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon University that focused on democratizing 3D game development, and which was acquired by Autodesk in 2010. Carnegie Mellon’s Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment Lab has partnered with Google on a number of mapping projects that use the university’s GigaPan technology.
Munichiello joined Google Ventures from being senior director of solutions design and professional services at Kiva Systems, a logistics robotics company sold to online retailer Amazon for $775m.
The Kiva sale last year was followed by Japan-based conglomerate Softbank buying 80% of Aldebaran, a France-based robot maker backed by Intel Capital, the corporate venturing unit of the eponymous chipmaker, for more than $100m.
Both exits sparked renewed interest in robotics as signs of rapid growth are starting to emerge. For the period 2013 to 2016, the federation forecasted a near-75% increase to about 94,800 units (primarily for the military and milking) with a value of $17.1bn.
This would be an increase from the more than 126,000 service robots for professional use counted since 1998 even if the federation said the total number of professional service robots sold in 2012 “rose by a relatively low 2%” to 16,067 units (worth $3.4bn), up from 15,776 in 2011.
And sales of all types of robots for domestic tasks (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) could reach almost 15.5 million units in the period 2013-2016, with an estimated value of $5.6bn, with toy robots a further 3.5 million units, about 3 million robots for education and research and about 6,400 robots for elderly and handicap assistance – a market will increase substantially within the next 20 years, according to the federation.
The bigger picture than headline unit sales, however, is the data and information. As Andy Rubin said in his New York Times interview: “I feel with robotics it’s a green field. We’re building hardware, we’re building software. We’re building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack.”
For a company wanting to understand all information getting into and shaping a world where there are potentially more robots than people and machine(-to-machine) communication is important.
Rubin, founder of what is now Google’s Android mobile operating system, has been looking for access into robotics technologies that could potentially help it develop the equivalent of its search engine, maps and Android systems – free to use and build upon but where Google can understand the data and uses of the system. The move into robotics also offers insights into the so-called internet of things, which currently usually relies on Bluetooth connections between a develop and an application but is reportedly struggling to find its standards to allow a wider communication systems – or roboweb.
Last year, news provider Forbes said there were about 8.7 billion devices connected to the internet. Next year, consultant Frost & Sullivan said machines would create more data and traffic than between humans. But perhaps it will be only a few years after that that Google’s shareholders choose to replace its human chief executive with a machine-learning robot the company has designed.
Next week will see Global Corporate Venturing take a break from its ezine but please check out the website for the news. Enjoy the holidays, thank you for the support this year and let us know how we can help in 2014.
Box: Backgrounds to Google’s robotics purchases
A nice Upstart piece look at what was known about the founders behind the eight robotics companies acquired by Google this year but there are some ties between most of them beyond their new owner even if none of them have apparently filed funding documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Marc Raibert founded Boston Dynamics after leading research laboratories at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) dedicated to building walking machines, including BigDog, Cheetah, Petman and Atlas.
Atlas competed in the US military’s Darpa-sponsored robotics competition along with Google-acquired Schaft, a team of Japanese roboticists who spun out of Tokyo University’s Jouhou System Kougaku (JSK) Robotics Lab.
Another, more recent, MIT spin-off acquired by Google is Meka Robotics, which was founded in 2006 by Aaron Edsinger and Jeff Weber. In 2012, the company teamed with the Human Centered Robotics Group at the University of Texas at Austin to develop HUME: a “bipedal robot for human-centered hyper-agility”.
Meka, along with research labs Willow Garage and SRI International, co-founded robotic arm maker Redwood Robotics, although the company is probably best known by its open source software suite ROS (Robot Operating System). Scott Hassan, an early Google employee, started Redwood in late 2006 and has now returned to the search engine provider after Google bought Redwood this year.
Other Willow spin-offs acquired by Google are Industrial Perception, which makes robotic three-dimension vision, and Holomni, a robot design firm apparently run by Bob Holmberg.
While the final reported Google acquisition is robotic camera system maker Bot & Dolly, which was co-founded by ex-Autofuss executives Jeff Linnell and Randall Stowell.