Over the past few months, we have seen a steady push by Google into the robotics arena. Their top secret, ‘area 51’ arm, Google X, which is just a stones throw from their GooglePlex corporate headquarters in Northern California has been known to push the boundaries in technology and is responsible for state of the art innovations such as driverless autonomous vehicles and is rumoured to include an even more secret military wing.With high profile acquisitions such as the ‘Cheetah Robot’ company, Boston Dynamics, and a few other robotics vendors, one can only attempt to speculate what they are planning to do. Well, let’s try..
The same thing that Smart car with a camera and a GPS system does… Not much… and then… Hello StreetView. Google’s bottomless pockets allow them to obtain the best minds in the world from trending tech startups. Just a few days back they threw a few dollars without batting an eyelid to acquire Nest; 3.2 billion of those dollars to be specific. Large acquisitions like this are done with great intent (mostly secret intent), so who knows what is to come. For example, in the past few days we have seen Google’s contact lenses with embedded glucose level detection electronics. Could they be merging all these ventures to move heavily into wearable tech, following in the footsteps of Google Glasses? Quite likely, but that is a whole other topic.We presume that Google is investing more into autonomous tech as robots would allow them to ‘index’ areas or regions that us mortal and error prone humans are unable to venture into. All we know for now is that something really innovative and will come, and probably soon.
It’s a little known fact that Google is one of the worlds largest electronic hardware manufacturers. In fact, they design and manufacture almost all the kit that makes up their vast, efficient and high tech data centres. So they already have the facilities in place to develop and manufacture a variety of state of the art equipment.Okay, let’s speculate…
That’s a really hard one to answer. We are always looking for the next big thing and we really don’t know what that is until it is here. The human species as intelligent and innovative as we are, have already been surpassed by technology in various ways. But that is our nature. We are tool building beasts and in our current age of nano and atomic technology the sky is the limit.How far away are we from a futuristic, Star Trek, cyborg and gadget filled world? We can’t say for sure, but not too far indeed. Only time will tell what the future might hold for us so let’s just hold on tight and enjoy the ride
