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Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

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51–60 of 91 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#51

As the article notes regular Gemini and Gemma also have spatial reasoning capabilities, which I decided to test by seeing if Gemini could drive a little rover successfully, which it mostly did: https://martin.drashkov.com/2026/02/letting-gemini-drive-my-... LLMs are really good at the sort of tasks that have been missing from robotics: understanding, reasoning, planning etc, so we'll likely see much more use of them…

For the fine-motor commands: or, the model can write the code to generate them on the fly. It seems to work, in my very limited experiment.

As for memory: my approach is to give the robot a python repl and, basically, a file system - the LLM can write modules, poke at the robot via interactive python, etc.

Basically, the LLM becomes a robot programmer, writing code in real-time.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#52
post #24
post #2

It does all start to feel like we'd get fairly close to being able to convincingly emulate a lot of human or at least animal behavior on top of the existing generative stack, by using brain-like orchestration patterns ... if only inference was fast enough to do much more of it. The gauge-reading example here is great, but in reality of course having the system synthesize that Python script, run the CV tasks, come bac…

Is emulating human behavior really a valuable end goal though? Humans exist as the evolutionary endpoint of exhaustion hunting large pray and organic tool-making. We've built loads of industrial and residential automation tools in the last 100 years and none of them are humanoid. I'd imagine a household robot butler would be more like R2D2 with lots and lots of arms.

Every single behavior? For sure not but otherwise we are the result of a very very long evolution and there is nothing else around us as smart and as adjustable.

The planing ahead thing through simulation for example seems to be a very good tool in neuronal network based architectures.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#54

This seems perfect to hook up to my 'LLMs can control robots over MCP' system. The idea is that LLMs are great at writing code, so let's lean in to that. I'll give it a try! I just got a bigger robot, we'll see how it does... https://colinator.github.io/Ariel/post1.html

Really unfortunate that I forgot what YT video i saw about this just 2 weeks ago.

It was about Googles PaLM-E evolution and progress. It basically has two models one which controls the robot, the other is a llm and they are combined together in some attention layer.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#55

I’ve been thinking about AI robotics lately… if internally at labs they have a GPT-2, GPT-3 “equivalent” for robotics, you can’t really release that. If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure. So there might be awesome progress behind the scenes, just not ready for the general public.

From an economic standpoint the industry is anyway the most relevant by far. Its easier as the env is a lot more controlled, professionals configure and maintain the robots, they buy in bulk and have more money.

My concern with a household robot is not the dishwasher but the tv screen, the glas door, glas table, animals (fish/aquarium) etc. the robot might walk through, touch through or fall onto.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#56
post #42

Is there a open source mini robot kit that allows me to play-around with agentic robots?

SO-ARM101 I guess? Or more likely the Lekivi variant.

I was also just in the market for a small experiment robot. I got the hiwonder armpi-fpv. Avoid it, the actuators are pretty bad - they're very 'grindy', the robot jitters like crazy when it moves. Any such problems with the lekivi?

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#57

I’ve been thinking about AI robotics lately… if internally at labs they have a GPT-2, GPT-3 “equivalent” for robotics, you can’t really release that. If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure. So there might be awesome progress behind the scenes, just not ready for the general public.

> If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure. Depending on what the rate of breaking dishes is, this would be a massive improvement on me, a human being, since I break a really important dish I needed to use like ~2x per month on average.

You really break a dish once every 2 weeks? That seems exceptionally clumsy.

Not here to shame you for it, for the record.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#58
>Our safest robotics model yet Safety is integrated into every level of our embodied reasoning models. Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is our safest robotics model to date, demonstrating superior compliance with Gemini safety policies on adversarial spatial reasoning tasks compared to all previous generations.

The safety guidelines are interesting, they treat them as a goal that they are aspiring to achieve, which seems realistic. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#59
Meanwhile, gemini 3.1 pro (that was released two months ago) was completely unavailable to me this afternoon, neither with API nor Subscription.

Nothing was reported in Google status page, not even the CLI is responding, it’s just left there waiting for an answer that will never arrive even after 10 minutes.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#60

This seems perfect to hook up to my 'LLMs can control robots over MCP' system. The idea is that LLMs are great at writing code, so let's lean in to that. I'll give it a try! I just got a bigger robot, we'll see how it does... https://colinator.github.io/Ariel/post1.html

Really unfortunate that I forgot what YT video i saw about this just 2 weeks ago. It was about Googles PaLM-E evolution and progress. It basically has two models one which controls the robot, the other is a llm and they are combined together in some attention layer.

Must have been https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mrGMMmrVNE from Welch Labs.
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