Report: Toyota Close to Buying Google Robotics Companies

Toyota Motor Corp. is in “final talks” with Google Inc. about buying two of the tech firm’s robotics units, The Nikkei reports.

The two companies—Waltham, Mass.-based Boston Dynamics and Japan’s Schaft Inc.—and their 300 software engineers and other technical experts would become part of the carmaker’s Toyota Research Institute (TRI), according to the newspaper, which doesn’t cite its sources. Toyota and Google declined to comment.

Google acquired Boston Dynamics, Schaft and six other companies in 2013 to form its robotics division. Boston Dynamics, which was launched in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed biped and quadruped robots under programs funded by the U.S. Defense Dept.’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Schaft was founded by two former researchers at the University of Tokyo’s JSK Robotics Laboratory. The company's two-legged robot won 2013’s DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Toyota invested $1 billion to establish TRI last November to develop artificial intelligence and robotics for next-generation vehicles—including self-driving cars, and set up research centers in Palo Alto, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass. TRI is led by Gill Prat, who previously headed DARPA and its robotic vehicle challenge.