Robert Playter

New Capabilities

As of May 2026: Overseeing Gemini integration into Spot and Atlas platforms

For decades, industrial robots have been powerful but rigid. Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, released April 14, 2026, is the latest version of a new approach: it gives robots the flexible reasoning that powers chatbots, tailored to understand and act in physical space. Paired with an agentic vision system, it reads pressure gauges, thermometers, and digital readouts with 98% accuracy—a capability that emerged from collaboration with Boston Dynamics, which deploys the Spot robot in industrial facilities.

Updated May 31