Google DeepMind Partners With Agile Robots as Gemini Robotics Foundation Models Expand to a Third Hardware Maker
Agile Robots will integrate Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics vision-language-action models into its industrial platform, joining Boston Dynamics and Apptronik in a growing ecosystem play.
Overview
Google DeepMind has signed a strategic research partnership with Munich-based Agile Robots to deploy its Gemini Robotics foundation models on the company’s industrial automation platform, the companies announced on March 24. The deal makes Agile Robots the third major hardware maker — after Boston Dynamics and Apptronik — to commit to building robots around Google’s vision-language-action AI, signaling a platform strategy that increasingly resembles the company’s Android playbook for mobile.
What We Know
Under the agreement, Agile Robots will integrate Gemini Robotics models into its lineup, which includes the FR3 force-sensitive arm, Diana 7 power-limited arm, Thor series arms, and the newly developed Agile ONE humanoid robot, according to Interesting Engineering. The companies plan to test, fine-tune, and deploy robots using Gemini foundation models across electronics manufacturing, automotive, data centers, and logistics, as reported by TechCrunch.
A central element of the arrangement is what both companies describe as a “scalable AI flywheel”: robots operating in production environments generate operational data that improves the underlying Gemini models, which in turn expand robotic capabilities and enable broader deployment. Agile Robots has already installed over 20,000 robotics solutions worldwide, providing a substantial base of real-world operational data to feed this loop, according to the official announcement.
“Integrating Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics models into our robotic solutions positions us at the cutting edge of this rapidly growing market,” said Zhaopeng Chen, CEO and founder of Agile Robots, in the company’s press release. Carolina Parada, senior director and head of robotics at Google DeepMind, called the partnership “an important step in bringing the impact of AI to the real world.”
The Gemini Robotics Platform
Gemini Robotics, which Google DeepMind introduced in March 2025, is a vision-language-action model built on Gemini 2.0 that adds physical actions as a new output modality for directly controlling robots. A companion model, Gemini Robotics-ER (embodied reasoning), provides advanced spatial understanding for roboticists who want to connect it with existing low-level controllers.
According to Google DeepMind’s technical blog post, the platform “more than doubles performance on a comprehensive generalization benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art vision-language-action models.” Gemini Robotics-ER achieves a two-to-three-times improvement in success rate over Gemini 2.0 in end-to-end control tasks involving perception, state estimation, spatial understanding, planning, and code generation.
The models were trained primarily on data from the ALOHA 2 bi-arm platform but can adapt to different robot types, including Franka arms and Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid, as described in the same blog post.
A Growing Ecosystem
The Agile Robots deal follows a pattern. At CES 2026 in January, Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics announced it would use Gemini Robotics to power its next-generation Atlas humanoid, with joint research on a new fleet of Atlas robots expected to begin later in 2026, as reported by TechCrunch. Under that arrangement, Boston Dynamics retains responsibility for hardware, locomotion, and system integration while DeepMind contributes perception, reasoning, and visual-language-action models.
Apptronik, maker of the 5-foot-8 Apollo humanoid, entered a similar partnership with Google DeepMind in December 2024, targeting manufacturing and logistics applications such as case picking, trailer unloading, and palletization.
Agile Robots, founded in 2018, has raised more than $270 million in venture capital from investors including the SoftBank Vision Fund and Xiaomi, according to TechCrunch.
What We Don’t Know
Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership or provided a specific timeline for when Gemini-powered Agile Robots products will reach customers. The announcement also did not specify which Agile Robots hardware will be first to run the Gemini Robotics models in production, though initial efforts will focus on high-value industrial use cases requiring adaptable, reliable automation.
It remains unclear whether Google DeepMind will offer Gemini Robotics as a broadly available platform to any hardware maker or continue to expand through selective partnerships. The company has not publicly addressed how it plans to manage competing interests among its growing roster of robotics partners, several of which may target the same industrial verticals.