The company made a video of the bots in action doing stuff like cleaning trash and picking up watering cans.
Google DeepMind just announced a new version of its artificial intelligence model Gemini that can control a range of robots. This includes humanoid robots capable of tasks like cleaning up trash and picking up watering cans. The company released a video of the Gemini Robotics 2 platform in action and the results are fairly impressive. It shows robots putting a tape into a boombox, screwing in a lightbulb and even tying up a garbage bag.
The original Gemini Robotics system could already power bots that performed finicky actions like closing storage bags and folding origami, but that was done via robotic arms and hands. This update brings "intelligent whole-body control" into the mix.
I'm fairly skeptical of this stuff, but Google promises the aforementioned video features "real-time footage" of "fully autonomous" robots. This operates in stark contrast to Elon Musk's Optimus robots, as a high-profile demo was proven to have used teleoperators to control the bots.
Google is doing this by stuffing the robots with several different AI models, which results in a multimodal understanding of their surroundings. There's a vision language model to help with understanding and two vision language action models that control full-body and hand movement.
It's worth noting that these aren't robots aren't general-purpose devices that can do just about anything. The model was specifically trained to perform every task in the video, using a mix of human teleoperation, video examples and simulations. Google DeepMind says "it's another milestone in our path towards really getting towards what we call like physical AGI, which means we get a robot to do anything that a human can," according to a statement published by Wired.
There is one final caveat here. These are robots filled with AI and, well, AI gets stuff wrong. That's frustrating when looking for an answer to a query, but potentially deadly when dealing with a heavy human-sized robot.
Google says it's taking a multi-layered approach to ensure future robots are safe. Each model layer has guardrails and it has introduced a new benchmark called ASIMOV-Agentic for detecting whether a command will lead to a harmful outcome.
"The safety question is even more pressing because you're putting them in a lot of other situations," Carolina Parada, head of robotics at Google DeepMind, told Wired. "There's a lot of uncertainty that will show up, and so you want to be able to understand the safety question more deeply."
Finally, this is all early stages. Google isn't about to roll out consumer-facing robots anytime soon. Robotics rival Elon Musk, on the other hand, promises Tesla's upcoming Optimus robots will be "the biggest product ever" that will result in $10 trillion in sales. He once stated we'd have 50,000 to 100,000 Optimus robots by 2026 and 1,000 of the little bots roaming around manufacturing facilities by the end of 2025. The latter didn't happen and the former won't happen.
