Gemini Robotics Released One Policy From Feet to Fingertips

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Gemini Robotics Released One Policy From Feet to Fingertips<br>Google DeepMind put a humanoid's legs, torso, arms and hands under a single learned policy this week, and ran one checkpoint across three different robots.<br>Jay Chia<br>Aug 06, 2026

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Gemini Robotics 2 controls the whole body

Figure got there first in one sense. Helix 02 replaced a hand-engineered balance controller with a learned one back in January, and drives locomotion and manipulation through one hierarchy on Figure’s own robots. What Gemini Robotics 2 adds is generality. Whole-body control now sits inside a general VLA, and DeepMind demonstrates it walking to a table, picking up a watering can, stepping to a shelf and placing it, as one continuous behavior rather than a handoff between modes. DeepMind scopes its own claim carefully, saying this is the first time their model can control entire humanoids.<br>The cross-embodiment result is the harder one. A single checkpoint controls Apptronik’s Apollo 2 with 22-DoF five-fingered SharpaWave hands, the same Apollo 2 with Inspire hands, and a Franka Duo with a Robotiq gripper. Two of those are dexterous humanoid hands with completely different kinematics, and the third is a parallel-jaw gripper on a fixed-base arm. Helix 02 runs on Figure’s fleet; this runs on whatever DeepMind pointed it at.<br>The release is three models. Gemini Robotics ER 2 does embodied reasoning over live video, tracks its own progress through a task, resumes from the last correctly completed step after a failure instead of restarting, calls tools including Search, and splits work across multiple robots of different types. Gemini Robotics 2 is the VLA. Gemini Robotics On-Device 2 runs locally and adapts to a new dual-arm embodiment from under 200 examples gathered in a few hours. A safety benchmark called ASIMOV-Agentic ships alongside, covering whether an embodied reasoner refuses unsafe tool calls from a VLA and whether it asks for human help when uncertain.

Read the access terms carefully, because most coverage has blurred them. ER 2 is public now through the Gemini API and AI Studio. Gemini Robotics 2 and On-Device 2 are limited to selected early-access partners. DeepMind’s own results chart is also candid that multi-finger dexterous manipulation lags well behind whole-body and gripper tasks, so the 22-DoF hands are the demo and the grippers are the working system.<br>Thanks for reading Topic Queue! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Alpamayo 2 Super is 34B of open weights you can ship

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TurboVLA drops the language model from the middle

The standard VLA pathway projects visual observations into an LLM’s representation space before decoding actions, and pays for that on every policy call. TurboVLA, from HUST and Huawei, encodes vision and language independently, exchanges information between them through a lightweight bidirectional interaction, and predicts continuous action chunks with a compact decoder. At 0.2B parameters it reports 97.7% average success on LIBERO with 31.2ms latency and 0.9GB of inference VRAM on a consumer RTX 4090, and the code is up. LIBERO is a sim benchmark and a single setup, so treat it as a lead worth checking rather than a settled result, but it is cheap enough that anyone with a gaming GPU can check it.<br>Frontier VLMs given a body score 16.8%

HumanCLAW separates deciding from executing, putting a vision-language model in command of a physically simulated body across 1,218 episodes. Nine state-of-the-art models were evaluated and the best reached 16.8%. The diagnosis is more useful than the number. These models lose track of their own body, and cannot reliably report where it is, whether it has reached the goal, or whether it has hit an obstacle.<br>GAIA-4 puts radar in the simulation loop

Wayve’s GAIA-4 closes the loop that GAIA-3 left open. The AI Driver goes back in and its decisions condition what it perceives next, so braking slows the generated viewpoint and steering shifts the next scene, while every other agent replays its logged trajectory exactly and the scene stays anchored to the real recording as a deterministic baseline. The technical claim is joint generation of radar alongside camera, which Wayve calls an industry first for...