Amazon's drones better keep an eye out for Google's robots

Google's robot guru is Andy Rubin - who Markoff says is ready to spend what it takes to make a practical robot."Andy is the person who built the Android phone business for Google, and Google has opened their checkbook to let Andy do what he wants to do,The Dow Jones industrial average was down Industrial robot, or 0.1 percent, to 15,618.22. The Nasdaq composite was up 3.27, or less than 0.1 percent, at 3,939.86." says Markoff.He's described by Markoff as somebody who has a history of turning his hobbies into money-making enterprises."He's always been an experimenter. I would go visit him while he was starting the Android business and he purchased himself, out of his own pocket, an $80,000 robot arm, and he was trying to program the robot arm to make espresso," says Markoff.That's something that Starbucks' Howard Schultz would be very interested in, too. 

"I'm watching this very carefully because the labor impact along the entire spectrum of the workforce is very interesting.Hassan then watched CCTV showing the defendant coming out of a storage cupboard at around 8.50pm,{$} naked and urinating on the lift door.ego-s electronic cigarette This generation of robotics is really going to transform the workforce," says Markoff.If Google succeeds in these driver-less cars and these humanoid robots, then what is left for the rest of us to do?"That is a great question," says Markoff. "One of the companies that Andy bought, that Google bought, is called Industrial Perception and what they have done is build a robot that loads and unloads trucks, and it's a very simple equation. The person who works for Walmart or Federal Express moves a box about every six seconds. IPI got their contract when they could move boxes every four seconds, which they can do now, and they think they can go to every two seconds.For special applications requiring the capture of continuous data at high speed,mini usb sticks or for data collection over a long period of time, certain gages can acquire such data and store it in memory, thus eliminating the need for data acquisition hardware and software.

"So I believe that the task of loading and unloading trucks over the next half decade is going away, and I'm mixed about that," says Markoff. "That's a livelihood for people, but you have to admit it's a tough job, and if there's something more creative and interesting for people to do, I think most people would rather do that."Why would Google need to unload trucks? Because Markoff says it plans to compete with Amazon."I think Google has ambitions that are every bit as big as Amazon's," says Markoff. "They're already experimenting with competing with Amazon. Amazon is restructuring retail in America. I think Google wants to do that too.