[fernly]

Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local supervision and a human controller watching through its video feed.

Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.

[1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/

[modeless]

I actually like Tau's videos a lot better than Google's. An agile robot getting out of a car carrying a tote is actually novel and difficult and useful. In contrast, what Google is showing here is mostly glorified pick and place with low success rates on a needlessly complex robot and a voice LLM slapped on top to pre-announce its moves like an anime character, with fancy video editing and bubbly music to distract you from how slow it is.

Sure Tau is teleoperated, but teleoperating an agile movement like that is actually really hard to get right and still involves AI to keep the robot balanced. Tau is a lot closer to real deployment than Google, and when it performs useful tasks it is simultaneously collecting the data to eventually automate those tasks.