Google acquires Boston Dynamics, eighth robotics company in six months

Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that makes robots, New York Times reported. This is the eighth robotics acquisition by Google in the last six months.

The company, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a well known maker of robotic machines that can walk with great balance or can even run faster than the fastest human beings. Pentagon is one of the buyers of these robots, reports say. Some of its robots are called BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas.

Google's robotic efforts are led by Andy Rubin, who also spearheaded the development of Android, and are also leading the development of self-drive cars. The penchant with Google is acquiring robotics companies indicates that the company is looking at building autonomous systems that can replace a lot of manual work.

Google has said that it would honor existing military contracts, and did not plan to become a military contractor on its own.