Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots • Hacker News Board

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#201

Post by bigfishrunning » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #189

qurren wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether. Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.

$45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the average american car loan today

That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#202

Post by summarybot » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

And absolutely nothing in your company charter says the military won't be allowed to buy it. Y'all think we've never seen a Terminator movie before, huh.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#203

Post by mrexroad » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

memonkey wrote: post #115

jameshart wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000. You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.

For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.

> folding laundry robot

This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles.

I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#204

Post by yhjc2692 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

freakynit wrote: post #196

What would be the hallucination equivalent of such robots?

falling down and breaking things?

I do think robotics would come up with more safety mechanisms (provably safe motion planning etc) just because the risk is a lot more serious than LLMs spitting half-truths

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#205

Post by walr000s » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

Robots that look humanoid are a marketing gimmick.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#206

Post by RandomLensman » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

luckydata wrote: post #172

Marha01 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you are not an introvert without telling me... I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind. A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!

you don't need to be an introvert to find that line of reasoning short sighted. I'm plenty extroverted and I still don't want to deal with people coming to my house to clean it. It's very invasive and they rarely do a good job. A robot that I can "train" to do exactly what I need and constantly works in the background would be a HUGE value add to my lifestyle.

The difference might be that I don't believe in these "machine gods of cleaning" being the thing to arrive (looking at current consumer goods) and then the boundary for what to choose shifts a lot if one is willing to deal with humans. The latter also doesn't need to be so foreign, e.g., could be someone already working for a friend.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#207

Post by YuechenLi » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

CardenB wrote: post #157

YuechenLi wrote: post #152

Running a full LLM to actuate a robot is way too heavy, the minimum latency they can get down to is probably 1-2 seconds even with powerful GPUs, which is not very useful for practical robotics applications. Machine vision should definitely be handled by ML, but motion actuation should be relegated in the realm of traditional PID style linear/nonlinear control. Again, the tech is cool, but the practical usefulness of…

AFAIK NVidia has a VLA running on their chips with 2B params at 10Hz. They’ve openly published a .5B model running at 10Hz

10Hz is still a 0.1s of latency, which doesn't seem like a lot until you realize that an Arduino typically runs at 16 Mhz, which is literally a million times faster than running a full LLM.

So, yeah, for complex reasoning and sensory processing, LLMs are the correct choice, and Gemini is especially strong at spatial reasoning over ChatGPT/Claude. But for actual motion/actuation? LLMs are the wrong tool for the job, probably easier to have LLMs program a reusable workflow in a script for repeated tasks instead of invoking LLMs after the first time.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#208

Post by blacksmith_tb » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

luckydata wrote: post #162

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper

it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical implications of letting a stranger inside your house is something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather have a robot.

Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#209

Post by jvidalv » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #137

garbageman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic litter box is a great example. We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong. High initial cost that pays back every day over the course of what will likely be a decade+ of usage. Absolutely worth every penny if you look to the horizon. I imagine the robot mowers and robot house maids will fall under the same type of payback but with even higher upfront costs - perhaps this will turn into yet anoth…

> We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong Interested. Which one?

Also interested.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#210

Post by lovasoa » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

heaney-555 wrote: post #60

qurren wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.

Of course we'll rent them! I don't even want to keep a robot in my flat all the time.

But that means speed does matter after all. The renting company will need to clean as many flats as possible with a single robot in a single day.