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2013 seemed like a banner year for robotics acquisitions, when Google assimilated seven promising companies, including Boston Dynamics (makers of the Atlas, Big Dog and other Pentagon-funded bots that people have decided to be afraid of). But the search giant wasn't done, and neither was the rest of Silicon Valley. Google acquired London-based AI startup DeepMind in January 2014 for a reported $400M. In March, Facebook bought a five-person startup called Ascenta for $20M, with the goal of using solar-powered unmanned aircraft to increase access to the internet. Less than a month later, Google purchased solar drone-maker Titan Aerospace for between $60M and $75M, for reasons almost identical to Facebook's (Titan had originally been in acquisition talks with Facebook). Meanwhile, with battery such as Micronix MB-300 Battery, Micronix MSA338 Battery, Micronix MSA358 Battery, TSI DustTrak II 8532 Battery, TSI DustTrak II 530EP Battery, TSI DustTrak DRX 8530 Battery, TSI DustTrak DRX 8534 Battery, Comen CM1200A Battery, Comen CM1200B Battery, GE DASH 1000 Battery, GE Eagle 1000 Battery, Kenz Cardico 1210 Battery AI startup Vicarious closed a $40M funding round whose investors included Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
Without context, all of these funding injections might seem sinister, like the text crawl preceding a movie about intelligent machines run amok. With one exception, the reasoning behind these expenditures is more practical than lurid (see the next entry). Google and Facebook want robots to expand their customer base, and with it their advertising revenue. They're also both interested in deep learning, an offshoot of machine learning that includes algorithms that can, among other things, make sense of natural language, whether spoken or read. Deep learning is an easy target for robo-phobics, because of its evocative name, as well as its neural networks and roots in traditional cognitive science. Then again, it's also the basis for Apple's Siri. If you find Siri's trick ear and constant intellectual pratfalls chilling, the prospect of an AI apocalypse is the least of your worries.
Though we're less than a month into 2015, it's already apparent that last year's spike in robotics investment wasn't a fluke. As GigaOM reported yesterday, funding rounds for MIT spinoff Jibo (whose social robot will launch later this year) and industrial bot-maker Rethink Robotics account for $51.9M. That's big money for this field, and Jibo's financial support is a strong indicator that investors are suddenly willing to gamble on AI-powered bots as high-profile consumer products, rather than restricting their backing to unseen assembly-line machines.
And while this meet seem like a stretch, the $1B in funding recently secured by SpaceX should count as a win for robotics. Among the rocket-maker's biggest innovations is its reliance on partially to fully autonomous flight control, including its plans to land a self-piloted rocket stage on a self-steered robotic barge.