Gemini Robotics 2 Gives Robots Full-body AI Control

Google DeepMind announced Gemini Robotics 2, a new version of its Gemini AI model that can control a range of robots, including humanoid machines with what the company called “intelligent whole-body control.”

Google released a video showing the robots cleaning trash, picking up watering cans, inserting a tape into a boombox, screwing in a lightbulb and tying a garbage bag.

The earlier Gemini Robotics system powered robots performing more limited manipulation tasks such as closing storage bags and folding origami, using robotic arms and hands rather than full-body movement.

Google said the new video shows “real-time footage” of “fully autonomous” robots. The source article contrasted that claim with a past Optimus demonstration by Tesla that it said had been shown to use teleoperators.

The system uses several AI models to give robots multimodal understanding of their surroundings. It includes a vision language model for understanding and two vision language action models that control full-body and hand movements.

The robots shown are not general-purpose machines, according to the source article. The model was trained specifically for each task in the video using human teleoperation, video examples and simulations.

Google DeepMind said the work is “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.

Google said it is applying a multi-layered safety approach to the robots. Each model layer has guardrails, and the company introduced a benchmark called ASIMOV-Agentic to detect whether a command could 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.”

Google said the technology remains in early stages and that it does not plan to roll out consumer-facing robots soon. The source article said Elon Musk has claimed Tesla’s Optimus robots could generate $10 trillion in sales and that Tesla would have 50,000 to 100,000 Optimus robots by 2026, after a separate projection of 1,000 robots in factories by the end of 2025 did not happen.

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