Google has pulled its HRP-2 Schaft robot from the DARPA Robotics Challenge to focus on a robot available to consumers. The Schaft robot easily won the qualifying round and was the frontrunner to win the $2 million competition.

RBR50 company Google has long said it doesn’t want funding from the military for developing robots. Well, that statement has never been clearer after the search giant pulled its Team Schaft HRP-2 robot out of the Pentagon-funded DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC).

The event is the most ambitious robotics competition to date with teams from around the world developing first responder robots. With the three-year competition less than halfway complete, there was a clear frontrunner: Tokyo-based Schaft, which easily won the qualifying event in December 2013.

Schaft was founded specifically to partake in the $2 million DARPA Robotics Challenge, but that line became blurred after it was acquired by Google in 2013. If Schaft receives funding from the Defense Department, then Google is essentially accepting funding from the Defense Department, which would go against Google’s stance.

Schaft announced in March that it would not accept any funding from the DARPA Challenge, but that it would remain in the competition. Apparently that has changed.

“Team Schaft has elected to withdraw from the finals,” DARPA program manager Gill Pratt said during a conference call on June 26. “They are going to be focusing on the development of their first commercial product. It was a very difficult decision for them, but they’ve done extremely well, and we’re really glad to see them being successful now in the commercial world.”

Popular Science reported in Jan. 2014 that Google was going to pull out, so this really isn’t all that surprising. According to the report, Google declined comment at the time, but it did say it wasn’t pursuing military contracts.

“That just doesn’t represent nearly a big enough market to interest Google,” Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, told Popular Science. ?Even the companies these days that are selling robots to the Defense Department are looking for other markets to sell robots to. You only ever need so many military robots in the world, and the size of that market pales in comparison to the consumer market.?

“Philosophy and ethics aside, that’s why [Google] wouldn’t even bother. You can get higher margins on the military side, but you?re just not going to do the volume,? Gerkey continued.

What’s the Future of DARPA Robotics Challenge?

Does Google pulling out strike a mortal blow to the DARPA competition? After all, Schaft won the last round quite handily. Can the remaining 11 teams make a bot as good as Google? It looks like we’ll never know, especially since the challenges have been tweaked, becoming harder than originally planned because the teams did so well last time around.

The news of Google backing out came during a conference call that was a general update on the DARPA Robotics Challenge. During the call, Pratt announced that the finals have been pushed back six months to June 5-6, 2015, at the Fairplex in Pomona, Calif. because of the new challenges.

“We think it will require quite a bit of innovation from the teams,” Pratt said. “In order to let them get there, we’re going to provide more time and funding.”

All competing teams now need to have their robots work wirelessly and without human intervention and complete the course all at once. And if a robot falls and can’t get up, it’s out.

Google will still maintain some connection to the DARPA Robotics Challenge as Boston Dynamics, another company Google acquired in 2013, developed the Atlas robot that several teams are using in the competition.

It would have been fun to see Schaft try to tackle these new obstacles, but apparently Google would rather sell robots straight to consumers. Do you blame them?