Google DeepMind wants one AI brain to run every robot, and it just taught that brain to use its whole body. It has released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of models that can control a humanoid from its feet to its fingertips. The system can also coordinate several machines at once and adapt to a new robot body in a few hours.
It is the clearest sign yet of what the industry calls “physical AI,” and Wired framed it as a real step toward “physical AGI.” The pitch is simple. The same kind of model that writes your emails is now learning to walk across a cluttered room and tidy it up.
From arms to the whole body
The headline change is control. DeepMind’s earlier robot models mostly moved an upper body to do tabletop tasks. Gemini Robotics 2 drives the entire machine. It can make a humanoid walk, crouch, stretch and balance while manipulating objects in tight spaces built for humans.
In a demo, Apptronik’s Apollo 2 robot heard a single instruction: put the watering can in the green bin on the bottom shelf. It walked to a table, picked up the can, stepped over to the shelves, bent down and placed it. That sounds trivial. Coordinating legs, torso, arms and hands from one prompt is not.
