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The inevitable outcome of artificial intelligence was always its use in robots, and that future might be closer than you think. Google today announced Gemini Robotics, an initiative to bring the world closer than ever to “truly general purpose robots.”
Google says AI robotics have to meet three principal qualities. First, they should be able to adapt on the fly to different situations. They must be able to not only understand but also respond to changing environments. Finally, the robots have to be dexterous enough to perform the same kind of tasks that humans can with their hands and fingers.
Google writes, “While our previous work demonstrated progress in these areas, Gemini Robotics represents a substantial step in performance on all three axes, getting us closer to truly general purpose robots.”
Research and studies into robotics have advanced by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Boston Dynamics is particularly well known for its bots that can walk and navigate in public, and you’ve no doubt seen footage of the robot dogs on TikTok. If Gemini Robotics fulfills its mission statement, we could be on the cusp of introducing true household assistants that can do everything from cleaning the house to packing your lunch.
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The earliest tests of Gemini Robotics used mounted arms to perform tasks like playing tic-tac-toe, packing a lunchbox, and even playing cards — and removing individual cards from a hand without bending them. It does this by incorporating an advanced vision-language model dubbed Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning).
Google is bringing together cutting-edge research from each of these areas of robotics to combine it into one form, governed by a set of safety guidelines that dictate robotic behavior. In January 2024, Google suggested a “Robot Constitution” that would govern how these machines behaved, based largely on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The team has since expanded that to something called the ASIMOV dataset that will allow researchers to better measure and test robot behavior in the real world.
Google published a paper that’s free to read, but fair warning: it’s highly technical and complex. However, if you’re interested in the world of robotics and what implications these projects hold for the future of the world, it’s worth a read.
