I’m in manufacturing. Machinery is highly specialised. Making a generic robot without taking up huge amount of floor space and/or huge leaps in programming is like… Kubernetes being good for hosting your moms book club blog.
In general you’re not wrong. It’s also an easy prediction to make because almost all new robotics efforts fail.
I’ll just say that they’ve been working with manufacturers for years on test projects. So this isn’t really a new thing so much as a formalization of whatever they came up with.
I’m still not sure how this stuff will go (X is of course for experimental stuff) but if the project has “graduated” to a company than I’d presume they have some revenue plan and potential customers. I could imagine that at least one of their trial projects with a manufacturer has worked out, and they think they can find more partners for this work. (I only scanned the beginning of the article)
They have been experimenting and developing a LOT of stuff since 2013 and plenty of it sadly does just get completely sacked and mothballed (and I have my personal gripes with the great projects they could have open sourced but instead they just let the bits rot). That said I think with how much I saw them working on they probably could find applications where profit is a real possibility.
I would LOVE to be proven wrong, but Google's track record with bringing products to market, and actually keeping them for longer than a media boost, is downright depressing.
At some point it feels like every Google side project is just a media buy for their real business: hiring engineers to drive more ad revenue, engineers who are enticed by shiny projects like these.