Robot Foundation Models

Google demonstrated Gemini Robotics ER 2 orchestrating Boston Dynamics Spot navigation and manipulator APIs to fetch popcorn from a natural-language request. The demo illustrates high-level planning and progress monitoring, not a new commercial Spot integration.

Gemini Robotics On-Device 2 is Google’s local vision-language-action model for producing numerical robot actions from instructions, images and robot state. It is a trusted-tester model, not a generally available download or API.

Google’s physical AI strategy now spans a cloud-accessible reasoning model, a local action model and research collaborations across several robot forms. The pieces are complementary, but they are not one turnkey robot platform.

Gemini Robotics ER 2 has standard and streaming public-preview endpoints. Both have free tiers; paid usage was listed at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens on August 6, 2026, with important differences in tools, data use and deployment design.

Gemini Robotics ER 2 is Google’s new high-level vision-language model for planning, tool use and progress monitoring in robot workflows. It is a public-preview orchestration layer, not a motor-control model or a finished robot product.

Compare VLA and VLM models in robotics, including outputs, action data, feedback, embodiment, evaluation and the limits of autonomy claims.

Understand vision-language-action models in robotics: architecture, training data, action representations, evaluation, limitations and deployment checks.