As the article notes regular Gemini and Gemma also have spatial reasoning capabilities, which I decided to test by seeing if Gemini could drive a little rover successfully, which it mostly did:
https://martin.drashkov.com/2026/02/letting-gemini-drive-my-...LLMs are really good at the sort of tasks that have been missing from robotics: understanding, reasoning, planning etc, so we'll likely see much more use of them in various robotics applications. I guess the main question right now is:
- who sends in the various fine-motor commands. The answer most labs/researchers have is "a smaller diffusion model", so the LLM acts as a planner, then a smaller faster diffusion model controls the actual motors. I suspect in many cases you can get away with the equivalent of a tool call - the LLM simply calls out a particular subroutine, like "go forward 1m" or "tilt camera right"
- what do you do about memory? All the models are either purely reactive or take a very small slice of history and use that as part of the input, so they all need some type of memory/state management system to actually allow them to work on a task for more than a little while. It's not clear to me whether this will be standardized and become part of models themselves, or everyone will just do their own thing.
LLMs are really good at the sort of tasks that have been missing from robotics: understanding, reasoning, planning etc, so we'll likely see much more use of them in various robotics applications. I guess the main question right now is:
- who sends in the various fine-motor commands. The answer most labs/researchers have is "a smaller diffusion model", so the LLM acts as a planner, then a smaller faster diffusion model controls the actual motors. I suspect in many cases you can get away with the equivalent of a tool call - the LLM simply calls out a particular subroutine, like "go forward 1m" or "tilt camera right"
- what do you do about memory? All the models are either purely reactive or take a very small slice of history and use that as part of the input, so they all need some type of memory/state management system to actually allow them to work on a task for more than a little while. It's not clear to me whether this will be standardized and become part of models themselves, or everyone will just do their own thing.