Google Just Shipped the Brain for Everyone Else's Humanoid Robot — and Published How Often It Drops Things
About This Episode
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30, the first of its models that can drive an entire humanoid — legs, torso, arms and multi-finger hands — from a single learned policy instead of stitching a walking system to a grasping system. It runs on other companies' hardware, including Apptronik's Apollo 2 and Boston Dynamics machines, and DeepMind published success rates well below what the demo videos suggest.
Our Take
The humanoid industry's bottleneck was never legs or hands, it was one brain that could run both at once — Google just shipped it as software for other companies' robots, and the published success rates show it still drops nearly a third of what it lifts.
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