Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini Robotics 2 on Wednesday, a suite of three AI models that gives humanoid and other robots whole-body control, sharper manipulation, and the ability to work together. The system can run locally on the robot itself and adapt to an entirely new machine body with a few hours of training data. DeepMind is pitching it as the "intelligence layer" for robots - the foundational operating system that every hardware maker builds on.
Rather than a single monolithic system, the company released three models across three access tiers:
- Gemini Robotics 2: A vision-language-action model that turns what a robot sees and is told into motor commands. It can drive a full humanoid from feet to fingertips, as well as standard two-armed systems.
- Gemini Robotics ER 2: An embodied-reasoning model that plans multi-step jobs over several minutes, recovers from failures, and lets multiple robots split a workflow between them.
- Gemini Robotics On-Device 2: A lightweight version that runs directly on the hardware, for industrial settings where cloud connectivity is unreliable or unavailable.
DeepMind demonstrated a single model checkpoint controlling three physically distinct robots: an Apptronik Apollo 2 fitted with two different sets of hands, and a separate two-armed rig with a gripper. One model ran hardware it was never designed for.
Unlike its 2025 system, which handled only a robot's upper body, this version controls movement from the torso down through the legs, letting a humanoid walk, crouch, bend, and reach at once. In one demonstration, an Apol
