Casarini, Federico
Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World
Gemini Robotics Team, null, Abeyruwan, Saminda, Ainslie, Joshua, Alayrac, Jean-Baptiste, Arenas, Montserrat Gonzalez, Armstrong, Travis, Balakrishna, Ashwin, Baruch, Robert, Bauza, Maria, Blokzijl, Michiel, Bohez, Steven, Bousmalis, Konstantinos, Brohan, Anthony, Buschmann, Thomas, Byravan, Arunkumar, Cabi, Serkan, Caluwaerts, Ken, Casarini, Federico, Chang, Oscar, Chen, Jose Enrique, Chen, Xi, Chiang, Hao-Tien Lewis, Choromanski, Krzysztof, D'Ambrosio, David, Dasari, Sudeep, Davchev, Todor, Devin, Coline, Di Palo, Norman, Ding, Tianli, Dostmohamed, Adil, Driess, Danny, Du, Yilun, Dwibedi, Debidatta, Elabd, Michael, Fantacci, Claudio, Fong, Cody, Frey, Erik, Fu, Chuyuan, Giustina, Marissa, Gopalakrishnan, Keerthana, Graesser, Laura, Hasenclever, Leonard, Heess, Nicolas, Hernaez, Brandon, Herzog, Alexander, Hofer, R. Alex, Humplik, Jan, Iscen, Atil, Jacob, Mithun George, Jain, Deepali, Julian, Ryan, Kalashnikov, Dmitry, Karagozler, M. Emre, Karp, Stefani, Kew, Chase, Kirkland, Jerad, Kirmani, Sean, Kuang, Yuheng, Lampe, Thomas, Laurens, Antoine, Leal, Isabel, Lee, Alex X., Lee, Tsang-Wei Edward, Liang, Jacky, Lin, Yixin, Maddineni, Sharath, Majumdar, Anirudha, Michaely, Assaf Hurwitz, Moreno, Robert, Neunert, Michael, Nori, Francesco, Parada, Carolina, Parisotto, Emilio, Pastor, Peter, Pooley, Acorn, Rao, Kanishka, Reymann, Krista, Sadigh, Dorsa, Saliceti, Stefano, Sanketi, Pannag, Sermanet, Pierre, Shah, Dhruv, Sharma, Mohit, Shea, Kathryn, Shu, Charles, Sindhwani, Vikas, Singh, Sumeet, Soricut, Radu, Springenberg, Jost Tobias, Sterneck, Rachel, Surdulescu, Razvan, Tan, Jie, Tompson, Jonathan, Vanhoucke, Vincent, Varley, Jake, Vesom, Grace, Vezzani, Giulia, Vinyals, Oriol, Wahid, Ayzaan, Welker, Stefan, Wohlhart, Paul, Xia, Fei, Xiao, Ted, Xie, Annie, Xie, Jinyu, Xu, Peng, Xu, Sichun, Xu, Ying, Xu, Zhuo, Yang, Yuxiang, Yao, Rui, Yaroshenko, Sergey, Yu, Wenhao, Yuan, Wentao, Zhang, Jingwei, Zhang, Tingnan, Zhou, Allan, Zhou, Yuxiang
Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. This report introduces a new family of AI models purposefully designed for robotics and built upon the foundation of Gemini 2.0. We present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Gemini Robotics executes smooth and reactive movements to tackle a wide range of complex manipulation tasks while also being robust to variations in object types and positions, handling unseen environments as well as following diverse, open vocabulary instructions. We show that with additional fine-tuning, Gemini Robotics can be specialized to new capabilities including solving long-horizon, highly dexterous tasks, learning new short-horizon tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations and adapting to completely novel robot embodiments. This is made possible because Gemini Robotics builds on top of the Gemini Robotics-ER model, the second model we introduce in this work. Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning) extends Gemini's multimodal reasoning capabilities into the physical world, with enhanced spatial and temporal understanding. This enables capabilities relevant to robotics including object detection, pointing, trajectory and grasp prediction, as well as multi-view correspondence and 3D bounding box predictions. We show how this novel combination can support a variety of robotics applications. We also discuss and address important safety considerations related to this new class of robotics foundation models. The Gemini Robotics family marks a substantial step towards developing general-purpose robots that realizes AI's potential in the physical world.
Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots
Caluwaerts, Ken, Iscen, Atil, Kew, J. Chase, Yu, Wenhao, Zhang, Tingnan, Freeman, Daniel, Lee, Kuang-Huei, Lee, Lisa, Saliceti, Stefano, Zhuang, Vincent, Batchelor, Nathan, Bohez, Steven, Casarini, Federico, Chen, Jose Enrique, Cortes, Omar, Coumans, Erwin, Dostmohamed, Adil, Dulac-Arnold, Gabriel, Escontrela, Alejandro, Frey, Erik, Hafner, Roland, Jain, Deepali, Jyenis, Bauyrjan, Kuang, Yuheng, Lee, Edward, Luu, Linda, Nachum, Ofir, Oslund, Ken, Powell, Jason, Reyes, Diego, Romano, Francesco, Sadeghi, Feresteh, Sloat, Ron, Tabanpour, Baruch, Zheng, Daniel, Neunert, Michael, Hadsell, Raia, Heess, Nicolas, Nori, Francesco, Seto, Jeff, Parada, Carolina, Sindhwani, Vikas, Vanhoucke, Vincent, Tan, Jie
Abstract--Animals have evolved various agile locomotion strategies, such as sprinting, leaping, and jumping. There is a growing interest in developing legged robots that move like their biological counterparts and show various agile skills to navigate complex environments quickly. Despite the interest, the field lacks systematic benchmarks to measure the performance of control policies and hardware in agility. We introduce the Barkour benchmark, an obstacle course to quantify agility for legged robots. Inspired by dog agility competitions, it consists of diverse obstacles and a time based scoring mechanism. This encourages researchers to develop controllers that not only move fast, but do so in a controllable and versatile way. To set strong baselines, we present two methods for tackling the benchmark. In the first approach, we train specialist locomotion skills using on-policy reinforcement learning methods and combine them with a highlevel navigation controller. In the second approach, we distill the specialist skills into a Transformer-based generalist locomotion policy, named Locomotion-Transformer, that can handle various terrains and adjust the robot's gait based on the perceived There has been a proliferation of legged robot development inspired by animal mobility. An important research question in this field is how to develop a controller that enables legged robots to exhibit animal-level agility while also being able to generalize environments, such as up and down stairs, through bushes, across various obstacles and terrains. Through the exploration and over unpaved roads and rocky or even sandy beaches. of both learning and traditional control-based methods, there Despite advances in robot hardware and control, a major has been significant progress in enabling robots to walk across challenge in the field is the lack of standardized and intuitive a wide range of terrains [10, 21, 20, 1, 27]. These robots are methods for evaluating the effectiveness of locomotion now capable of walking in a variety of indoor and outdoor controllers.
Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Haarnoja, Tuomas, Moran, Ben, Lever, Guy, Huang, Sandy H., Tirumala, Dhruva, Wulfmeier, Markus, Humplik, Jan, Tunyasuvunakool, Saran, Siegel, Noah Y., Hafner, Roland, Bloesch, Michael, Hartikainen, Kristian, Byravan, Arunkumar, Hasenclever, Leonard, Tassa, Yuval, Sadeghi, Fereshteh, Batchelor, Nathan, Casarini, Federico, Saliceti, Stefano, Game, Charles, Sreendra, Neil, Patel, Kushal, Gwira, Marlon, Huber, Andrea, Hurley, Nicole, Nori, Francesco, Hadsell, Raia, Heess, Nicolas
We investigate whether Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) is able to synthesize sophisticated and safe movement skills for a low-cost, miniature humanoid robot that can be composed into complex behavioral strategies in dynamic environments. We used Deep RL to train a humanoid robot with 20 actuated joints to play a simplified one-versus-one (1v1) soccer game. We first trained individual skills in isolation and then composed those skills end-to-end in a self-play setting. The resulting policy exhibits robust and dynamic movement skills such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more; and transitions between them in a smooth, stable, and efficient manner - well beyond what is intuitively expected from the robot. The agents also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. The full range of behaviors emerged from a small set of simple rewards. Our agents were trained in simulation and transferred to real robots zero-shot. We found that a combination of sufficiently high-frequency control, targeted dynamics randomization, and perturbations during training in simulation enabled good-quality transfer, despite significant unmodeled effects and variations across robot instances. Although the robots are inherently fragile, minor hardware modifications together with basic regularization of the behavior during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way. Indeed, even though the agents were optimized for scoring, in experiments they walked 156% faster, took 63% less time to get up, and kicked 24% faster than a scripted baseline, while efficiently combining the skills to achieve the longer term objectives. Examples of the emergent behaviors and full 1v1 matches are available on the supplementary website.