Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6: Powering real-world robotics tasks through enhanced embodied reasoning

April 14, 2026 Models

Laura Graesser and Peng Xu

For robots to be truly helpful in our daily lives and industries, they must do more than follow instructions, they must reason about the physical world. From navigating a complex facility to interpreting the needle on a pressure gauge, a robot’s “embodied reasoning” is what allows it to bridge the gap between digital intelligence and physical action.

Today, we’re introducing Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a significant upgrade to our reasoning-first model that enables robots to understand their environments with unprecedented precision. By enhancing spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding, we are bringing a new level of autonomy to the next generation of physical agents.

This model specializes in reasoning capabilities critical for robotics, including visual and spatial understanding, task planning and success detection. It acts as the high-level reasoning model for a robot, capable of executing tasks by natively calling tools like Google Search to find information, vision-language-action models (VLAs) or any other third-party user-defined functions.

Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 shows significant improvement over both Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 and Gemini 3.0 Flash, specifically enhancing spatial and physical reasoning capabilities such as pointing, counting, and success detection. We are also unlocking a new capability: instrument reading, enabling robots to read complex gauges and sight glasses — a use case we discovered through close collaboration with our partner, Boston Dynamics.

Starting today, Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is available to developers via the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. To help you get started, we are sharing a developer Colab containing examples of how to configure the model and prompt it for embodied reasoning tasks.

Pointing: The foundation of spatial reasoning

Pointing is a fundamental capability for an embodied reasoning model, evolving with each model generation. Points can be used to express many concepts, including:

• Spatial reasoning: Precision object detection and counting
• Relational logic: Making comparisons, such as identifying the smallest item in a set; defining "from-to" relationships (e.g move X to location Y)
• Motion reasoning: Mapping trajectories and identifying optimal grasp points
• Constraint compliance: Reasoning through complex prompts like "point to every object small enough to fit inside the blue cup"

Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 can use points as intermediate steps to reason about more complex tasks. For example, it can use points to count items in an image, or to identify salient points on an image to help the model perform mathematical operations to improve its metric estimations.

The example below shows Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6’s strengths in pointing to multiple elements, and knowing when and when not to point.

Success Detection: The engine of autonomy

In robotics, knowing when a task is finished is just as important as knowing how to start it. Success detection is a cornerstone of autonomy, serving as a critical decision-making engine that allows an agent to intelligently choose between retrying a failed attempt or progressing to the next stage of a plan.

Achieving visual understanding in robotics is challenging, requiring sophisticated perception and reasoning capabilities combined with broad world knowledge in order to handle complicating factors such as occlusions, poor lighting and ambiguous instructions. Additionally, most modern robotics setups include multiple camera views such as an overhead and wrist-mounted feed. This means a system needs to understand how different viewpoints combine to form a coherent picture at each moment and across time.

Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 advances multi-view reasoning, enabling the system to better understand multiple camera streams and the relationship between them, even in dynamic or occluded environments, as demonstrated in the typical multi-view scenario below.

Instrument reading: Real-world visual reasoning

To understand a key strength of Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, we must look at how it combines capabilities like spatial reasoning and world knowledge to solve complex, real-world problems. A perfect example is instrument reading.

This task stems from facility inspection needs, a critical focus area for our partners at Boston Dynamics. Industrial facilities contain many instruments — thermometers, pressure gauges, chemical sight glasses and more — that require constant monitoring. Spot, a Boston Dynamics robot product, is able to visit the instruments throughout the facility and capture images of them.

Instrument reading requires complex visual reasoning. One must precisely perceive a variety of inputs — including the needles, liquid level, container boundaries, tick marks and more — and understand how they all relate to each other. In the case of sight glasses, this involves estimating how much the liquid fills the sightglass taking into account distortion from the camera perspective. Gauges typically have text describing the unit, which must be read and interpreted, and some have multiple needles referring to different decimal places that need to be combined.

Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 achieves its highly accurate instrument readings by using agentic vision, which combines visual reasoning with code execution. The model takes intermediate steps: first zooming into an image to get a better read of small details in a gauge, then using pointing and code execution to estimate proportions and intervals and get an accurate reading, and ultimately applying its world knowledge to interpret meaning.

Read an analog gauge with accuracy

Our safest robotics model yet

Safety is integrated into every level of our embodied reasoning models. Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is our safest robotics model to date, demonstrating superior compliance with Gemini safety policies on adversarial spatial reasoning tasks compared to all previous generations.

The model also shows a substantially improved capacity to adhere to physical safety constraints. For example, it makes safer decisions through spatial outputs like pointing regarding which objects can be safely manipulated under gripper or material constraints (e.g., “don't handle liquids”, “don't pick up objects heavier than 20kg“).

We also tested how well the model identifies safety hazards in text and video scenarios based on real-life injury reports. On these tasks, our Gemini Robotics-ER models improve over baseline Gemini 3.0 Flash performance (+6% in text, +10% in video) in perceiving injury risks accurately.

Collaborate with us to improve embodied reasoning for robotics

We are committed to ensuring Gemini Robotics-ER provides maximum value to the robotics community. If current capabilities are limited for your specialized application, we invite you to submit this form with 10–50 labeled images illustrating specific failure modes to help us build more robust reasoning features. We look forward to collaborating with you to enhance these capabilities in our upcoming releases.

Try Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 now on Google AI Studio