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

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April 14, 2026 Models Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6: Powering real-world robotics tasks through enhanced embodied reasoning Laura Graesser and Peng Xu

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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.

Figure 1: Benchmark results comparing Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 with Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 and Gemini 3.0 Flash models. The instrument reading evaluations were run with agentic vision enabled (except for Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 which doesn’t support it). All other evals were run with agentic vision disabled. The single view and multiview success detection evaluations contain different examples so are not comparable.

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.

Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 correctly identifies the number of hammers (2), scissors (1), paintbrushes (1), pliers (6), and a collection of garden tools which can be interpreted as a single group or multiple points. It does not point to requested items that are not present in the image — a wheelbarrow and Ryobi drill. In comparison Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 fails to identify the correct number of hammers or paint brushes, misses the scissors altogether, hallucinates a wheelbarrow and lacks precision on plier pointing. Gemini 3.0 Flash is close to Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, but does not handle the pliers as well.

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.

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Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 takes cues from multiple camera views to determine when the task "put the blue pen into the black pen holder" is complete.

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.

Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 enables robots to interpret a variety of instruments, including circular pressure gauges, vertical level indicators and modern digital readouts.

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…