TL;DR: Boston Dynamics teamed up with Google DeepMind to give their Spot robot the Gemini AI model. Now it can actually reason about what it sees on the factory floor.
Boston Dynamics is done just making robots that balance well. They want them to think. The company just partnered with Google DeepMind to integrate the Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 model directly into Spot’s inspection software. This completely changes what the robot can do.
Before this upgrade, Spot was great at walking around and snapping photos. Now, it can actually understand those photos. The new AI Visual Inspection system lets Spot look at a factory floor and flag complex issues. It spots open doors. It recognizes hazardous chemical spills. It even sorts objects dynamically based on simple text prompts.
This is a big deal for industrial inspections. You no longer need an engineer to hardcode every single defect the robot should look for. Spot can just use the Gemini model to reason about its environment in real time. It is exactly the kind of embodied AI the industry has been waiting for.