AI in the physical world: humanoid robots, embodied foundation models and the ability to act in real settings.
Google Deepmind introduced Gemini Robotics 2.5, a new control model for robots, and tested it with Apptronik on active Mercedes-Benz production lines in Hungary and Germany. The humanoid robot Apollo 2 sorted metal parts there with a reported success rate of 96 percent.
Our most capable vision-language-action model enhances robot dexterity, reliability, and safety
Simulation, which has long been the proving ground for robots learning to walk, roll and hop, is now helping researchers teach robots tasks that require a finer touch: aligning gears, connecting cables and assembling small components.
Today we're introducing a framework for creating these environments; we call them FoundationWorlds. Our first foundation world is ToyBlocks : an open simulation framework built around a robot arm and blocks on a tabletop.
NVIDIA Cosmos world model development platform adds four new open-weight checkpoints to its Cosmos 3 model family for generating interactive world simulation and multi-sensor multi-view driving scenes. All four models are post-trained examples of Cosmos 3 Nano and have 16B trainable parameters. The models use OpenMDW1.1, permitting commercial and non-commercial use under its terms.
Today, we take the next step and introduce Cosmos3-H-Dreams, bringing interactive generative simulation to the visual and procedural complexity of clinical surgery with our most convincing in-body imagery to date. To our knowledge, this is the first real-time generative surgical simulator trained on clinical cholecystectomy recordings to support live kinematic control.
Google's Gemini 4 Argon controls robots, generates simulations from photos or sketches, and evaluates training videos. On Google's own ERQA benchmark, it scores 87 percent. But the published example prompts show that the demos still need a lot of human guidance.
Gemini 4 Argon marks a step change in physical understanding, code generation, and visual-semantic reasoning—unlocking new workflows across the robotics stack and accelerating progress toward physical AGI. Using pure reasoning, Argon scores 87% on the Embodied Reasoning (ERQA) benchmark, outperforming every other frontier model.
Fei-Fei Li's AI startup World Labs is being acquired by AMD for $8.2 billion. Li, the pioneer behind ImageNet, will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. World Labs brings its spatial intelligence models, including Atlas, which generates and simulates 3D environments from minimal input.
The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.
Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads.
To build and deploy sophisticated robotics applications that can perceive, reason and act in dynamic environments, developers need new physical AI models and tools. The ROS open framework is a project from Open Robotics that helps humans build robots.
Gemini Robotics ER 2 helps robots reason, collaborate, and solve real-world tasks. It represents a step change in video understanding, tool orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration for robotic applications.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a next-generation robot intelligence layer achieving whole-body control of a complete humanoid robot for the first time, with fine manipulation using both hands and grippers.
Hugging Face released Grabette, an open-source system recording manipulation demonstrations with a handheld gripper and two cameras, producing robot-ready datasets without robots or teleoperation equipment. The handheld hardware costs about €490 in materials, with the accompanying motorised Gripette gripper around €120. Hardware CAD, Raspberry Pi collection software and browser-based processing are all open-source.
Introducing Robostral Navigate: 8B model achieving 76.6% on R2R-CE with just a single RGB camera. No depth sensors, LiDAR, or multiple cameras needed.
Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.6.0, introducing world model policies VLA-JEPA, FastWAM and LingBot-VA, new VLAs GR00T N1.7, MolmoAct2, EO-1, EVO1 and Multitask DiT, and a unified reward model API with Robometer and TOPReward for the robotics learning loop.
Gemini Robotics ER 1.6: Enhancing spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding for autonomous robotics.