Military robot-maker acquired by Google

The group, founded in 1992 by former MIT professor Marc Raibert, is the eighth robotics company to be snapped up by the search engine giant in recent months. Among the creations to crawl, jump and gallop from its labs are BigDog, a four-legged robot that is able to move over rough terrain such as snow and ice, and Cheetah, which holds the record for the fastest legged robot in the world, running at more than 28mph. What Google plans to do with Boston Dynamics has not yet been disclosed, although it has said that it will honour its existing contracts with DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research unit.