TL;DR: Spot just got a massive AI upgrade with Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, letting it roam factories and reason about hazards completely on its own.
Robots are amazing, but honestly? They’ve always been a pain to talk to. Until recently, getting a metal dog to do anything useful meant writing brittle code. Boston Dynamics is changing that by slapping Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 right into Spot.
Now, instead of strictly following waypoints, Spot actually understands what it’s looking at.
Here’s the trick. Spot can wander around an industrial facility, read complex analog gauges, and spot dangerous spills. If it gets confused, it pings vision-language-action models to help figure out what’s happening. And it does this autonomously. No joystick required.
They even dropped a video of Spot recycling soda cans in a living room. Yeah, it grabs the cans sideways—which is a terrible idea if there’s liquid left inside—but it proves a point. The robot is reasoning. Carolina Parada from DeepMind says they’re working on teaching the models how to hold things safely, mostly by throwing thousands of “what not to do” scenarios at it.
We’re finally moving past robots that just follow lines on the floor. Spot is starting to think.