Apple’s secret robotics team is moving from the AI division to the hardware group

The executive shakeups at Apple continue this week with a new Bloomberg report saying that the company’s robotics team will be under new management.

The team, which isn’t public but isn’t exactly a secret, has been working under John Giannandrea’s machine learning and AI group. We wrote recently about an interesting research paper and video from the team showing expressive “emotion” movements with an experimental AI-powered lamp. It’s an impressive demonstration of some of the things the group has been working on, likely in advance of a future rumored tabletop assistant with a robotic arm and iPad-like display “face.” With advanced AI, speakers, microphones, cameras, and robotic actuators, this is meant to be a sort of helpful home companion.

Now, this robotics team is moving from the AI/ML group to the hardware division, which is overseen by Senior Vice President John Ternus.

This could be seen as simply a move to reduce the responsibilities of Giannandrea’s group, taking away the impetus to build products and letting the group focus on the underlying artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that are used throughout the company. More of a pure specialized R&D group, in other words. The Siri team was moved out of Giannandrea’s group earlier this year after the well-publicized failure to meet deadlines and keep up with the digital assistants of rivals.

But it might also mean that the project is shifting out of the lab to into serious product development. Once a core concept has been proven, it takes a long time to engineer a real mass-produced product out of it, especially to the quality level one expects from Apple. This shift to the hardware division may be an indication that this work is now underway.