Google expansion in robotics closes the control loop, bringing integrated sensing and actuation to the logic based in Google algorithms. The New York Times said in a Dec. 4, 2013, article that Andy Rubin, who built Android software for smartphones, is the engineer leading Google's robotics efforts. Before Google's self-driving car, use of the word "robot" within Google generally referred to its crawler algorithms, software code that was anthropomorphized into the term "robot" presumably because the software traverses the Internet, doing analysis. With the purchase of eight robotics firms (perhaps most interesting, Boston Dynamics, with galloping, leaping, and crawling robots), Google advances in controlling the physical world, beyond software. The company is looking to close the control loop with robotics.
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