It's a big company so it should be no surprise that some sections of Google are very excited about robotics. For example you may have seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaF43Ze1oeI which is research done by Levine et al at Google. One thing to notice in the video though is that those are all custom arms. Someone was able to get $1M+ to build out that lab and the work is on going.
I think the thing that Google has recognized is that cutting edge robotics research that takes advantage of the work they have already done in deep learning doesn't require the kind of robots that Boston Dynamics (or many of the other companies they bought) build. Cutting edge robotics (from the perspective of learning systems) is back at the level of getting a single arm and a camera to learn basic tasks. In fact, there is a lot of research that can be done in simulation with these new deep methods that doesn't even require hardware.
The software and learning systems they can develop will very likely make their way into super advanced complex hardware like Atlas in the future, but for now it's probably not the best use of their time.
I think the thing that Google has recognized is that cutting edge robotics research that takes advantage of the work they have already done in deep learning doesn't require the kind of robots that Boston Dynamics (or many of the other companies they bought) build. Cutting edge robotics (from the perspective of learning systems) is back at the level of getting a single arm and a camera to learn basic tasks. In fact, there is a lot of research that can be done in simulation with these new deep methods that doesn't even require hardware.
The software and learning systems they can develop will very likely make their way into super advanced complex hardware like Atlas in the future, but for now it's probably not the best use of their time.