Intrinsic is joining Google to advance physical AI in robotics

Just five years after spinning out from Alphabet Inc.’s “moonshot factory,” Intrinsic Innovation LLC is joining Google LLC. The physical AI startup said that being part of Google will allow it to amplify its work across frontier AI, from research and development through deployment and daily operations, enabling industrial use cases in manufacturing and logistics.

The companies did not disclose financial details of the transaction. As a distinct group within Google, the company will continue evolving the Intrinsic platform, using the capabilities of Google Gemini models and Google Cloud, as well as working closely with Google DeepMind.

Wendy Tan White, the current CEO of Intrinsic, will remain in her position, reporting to Hiroshi Lockheimer, the chief product officer of Other Bets at Google. The rest of the unit’s reporting and leadership team remains the same, an Intrinsic spokesperson told The Robot Report.

“The Intrinsic team has been working for years to enable access to intelligent robotics through a democratized platform, so more people can build and benefit from robotics applications,” stated White. “Combined with Google’s incredible AI and infrastructure, we’re going to unlock the promise of physical AI for a much broader set of manufacturing businesses and developers. This will fundamentally shift production, from its economics to operations, and enable truly advanced manufacturing.”

Intrinsic partnerships to continue

Since spinning out from Alphabet, Intrinsic has worked with it in other capacities. Last year, it partnered with Alphabet subsidiary Foxconn to create the AI that powers robots in the electronics contract manufacturer’s U.S. factories.

The companies plan to integrate AI, robotics, and digital twins into modular automation. Mountain View, Calif.-based Intrinsic said it will also continue working with Foxconn and its other existing partners.

Google has been focusing more of its attention on robotics this year. At CES last month, Boston Dynamics announced that it is working with Google DeepMind to make its Atlas humanoid smarter with its Gemini Robotics foundation models.

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Flowstate platform to continue evolving

Intrinsic offers Flowstate, a web-based development environment and simulation engine. It said Flowstate enables users to build applications with ready-to-use “building blocks of robotic behaviors” known as skills. Skills can be manually developed or AI-enabled, without the need for deep expertise and hundreds of programming hours, asserted the company.

With a few clicks, users can launch intelligent robotic applications from simulation right through to real-world production in a fraction of the time it usually takes, according to Intrinsic. Flowstate can perform a range of tasks, such as identifying complex parts for assembly, automatically generating code for efficient robot motions, or delicately handling parts using force sensors.

Intrinsic plans to continue evolving this platform. It said it built Flowstate to be software-, hardware-, robot-, and AI-agnostic so that developers can build the right system with the right assets for the job. The company claimed that its industrial-grade operating system will complement the AI research coming from Google.

“At Google, we see the immense opportunity in bridging the gap between the digital and physical world – that is also true for intelligent robotics in industries like manufacturing and logistics,” said Lockheimer. “We’re excited to welcome the Intrinsic team to Google, so we can bring breakthrough AI to more businesses and industries, at scale.”

Since it was founded in 2021, Intrinsic has expanded both internal R&D and through acquisitions. In 2022, Intrinsic acquired the Open Source Robotics Corp. (OSRC). This is the for-profit arm of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), the organization behind the Robot Operating System (ROS).

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