Google Is Giving Away ‘The Android Of Robotics’

Google’s Intrinsic is open sourcing the foundation of its industrial robotics platform today. The company is releasing control, motion planning, grasp planning, simulation, pose estimation and camera calibration software that was previously locked inside a proprietary product and making it open source under a permissive Apache 2.0 license.

It’s called Intrinsic Core. It’s ROS-compatible by design, so it works with the open source middleware that most of the robotics world runs on, and according to Intrinsic, these are the same capabilities used daily for real deployments. In other words, it’s not some stripped-down demo build. In addition Intrinsic is releasing what it calls the Open Machine Tending Solution, a reference design for AI-enabled CNC machine tending that runs on Intrinsic Core and supports models from robot makers like FANUC and Universal Robots out of the box.

The pitch is simple: robotics developers keep rebuilding the same plumbing. Drivers, kinematics, collision-aware path generation, calibration routines and so on. That means teams burn weeks if not months of development time on infrastructure before building something unique and actually starting to add value.

Intrinsic wants to hand that layer over for free. The more interesting question, of course, is what Google gets in return for this.

The Android comparison is Google’s

Earlier this year in February, Intrinsic stopped being an Alphabet “Other Bet” and folded into Google proper as a distinct group, with CEO Wendy Tan White reporting to Hiroshi Lockheimer. The move plugged Intrinsic into Gemini models, Google Cloud infrastructure and Google DeepMind research.

Tan White told CNBC what Sundar Pichai said about the platform when the deal came together. Pichai called Intrinsic "the Android of robotics.”

Seven months later and we see the Android playbook unfolding.

Open half, meet closed half

Intrinsic Core is just part of Google’s physical AI push.

All of this makes sense if you’re Google.