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Andy Rubin, a high-ranking Google executive who spearheaded the company’s entrance into mobile phones and tablets and was in charge of the company’s nascent robotics group, has left the company.

Mr. Rubin is leaving to start a tech incubator focused on start-ups interested in building hardware, he said.

“I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next. With Android he created something truly remarkable — with a billion-plus happy users,” said Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, in a statement.

Mr. Rubin’s departure is part of a series of recent executive moves that seem to give Mr. Page more room to focus on the company’s longer-term bets — like robotics — while handing almost all the responsibility for Google products to Sundar Pichai, a rising star.

The robotics group will now be led by James Kuffner, who has been at the company since 2009 and has worked on self-driving cars, a Google spokesman said.

Mr. Rubin was a founder of Android, the mobile operating system behind Google’s smartphones and tablets, which Google acquired in 2005. The product was introduced in 2007 to rival the iPhone, and today has more than one billion active users.

Last year, Mr. Rubin left Android and began an ambitious acquisition spree that included at least eight companies, with the intent of building a robotics business inside Google. The division is focused on a diverse set of areas surrounding manufacturing and logistics. For instance, Mr. Rubin told people that he intended to embark on a 10-year project that would automate things like Google Express — the company’s same-day delivery service.

Last week, Mr. Page appointed Mr. Pichai to run essentially every Google product except YouTube. The move added an extra layer of management and gave Google a more traditional corporate structure in which Mr. Pichai was, in essence, Mr. Page’s chief operating officer, at least as it related to products.

This marked a major reorganization for Google, because it meant that various product chiefs who used to report directly to Mr. Page would report directly to Mr. Pichai.

“These changes will free me up a bit so I can focus on the bigger picture with Sundar when it comes to our core products,” Mr. Page said in a memo.

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