SoftBank is accelerating its robotics technology efforts. The Japanese giant has today announced that it will be acquiring two more robotics firms, Alphabet’s Boston Dynamics and Japan-based Schaft, to further make its mark in the field of robotics. The financial terms of both the transactions haven’t been disclosed and are subject to customary regulatory approvals.
SoftBank Group Corp., a subsidiary of the Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank, has signed a definitive agreement with Alphabet to acquire robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics. This falls in line with the murmurs we’ve been hearing for the past year, when reports of Alphabet looking to off-load Boston Dynamics first surfaced on the interwebs.
Commenting on the acquisition, Masayoshi Son, Chairman & CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., said,
Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities. Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots.
I am thrilled to welcome them to the SoftBank family and look forward to supporting them as they continue to advance the field of robotics and explore applications that can help make life easier, safer and more fulfilling.
Boston Dynamics, for those unaware, is a 25-years old robotics company that spun-off from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The said initiative kicked off when National Academy of Engineering member Marc Raibert and his colleagues first developed robots that ran and maneuvered like animals. The robotics firm was acquired by Google back in 2013 and has continued to focus on building bipedal and quadruped robots like Atlas and BigDog.
As mentioned in the official press statement, the transaction aligns with SoftBank’s investments in paradigm-shifting technologies and its vision of catalyzing the next wave of smart robotics. This aligns with Boston Dynamics’ long-standing mission, Marc Raibert, CEO and founder of Boston Dynamics, talks about the new partnership saying,
We at Boston Dynamics are excited to be part of SoftBank’s bold vision and its position creating the next technology revolution, and we share SoftBank’s belief that advances in technology should be for the benefit of humanity.
We look forward to working with SoftBank in our mission to push the boundaries of what advanced robots can do and to create useful applications in a smarter and more connected world.
In addition, SoftBank has also bought another secretive bipedal robotics firm Schaft, which is based out of Japan. The said venture is a University of Tokyo spin-off and was founded in the JSK Robotics Laboratory back in 2012. The company revealed its prototype robots a couple years after Boston Dynamics’ did. It is presently being driven by co-founders Yuto Nakanishi, Junichi Urata, Narito Suzuki and Koichi Nishiwaki, who’ve continued to perform pioneering work over the years.
