Time: 3-4 pm Eastern Time, May 1 (Friday), 2026

Location: MSEE 112

Zoom Link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/98798335169

Coffee and snacks will be provide.

General-purpose robots need a deep understanding of the physical world, advanced reasoning, and general and dexterous control. This report introduces the latest generation of the Gemini Robotics model family: Gemini Robotics 1.5, a multi-embodiment Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, and Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, a state-of-the-art Embodied Reasoning (ER) model. We are bringing together three major innovations. First, Gemini Robotics 1.5 features a novel architecture and a Motion Transfer(MT) mechanism, which enables it to learn from heterogeneous, multi-embodiment robot data and makes the VLA more general. Second, Gemini Robotics 1.5 interleaves actions with a multi-level internal reasoning process in natural language. This enables the robot to "think before acting” and notably improves its ability to decompose and execute complex, multi-step tasks, and also makes the robot's behavior more interpretable to the user. Third, Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 establishes a new state-of-the-art for embodied reasoning, i.e., for reasoning capabilities that are critical for robots, such as visual and spatial understanding, task planning, and progress estimation. Together, this family of models takes us a step towards an era of physical agents, enabling robots to perceive, think, and then act so they can solve complex multi-step tasks.

Dr. Tingnan Zhang is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Georgia Tech, where he studied under Prof. Dan Goldman. Dr. Zhang is a pioneer in applying reinforcement learning to robot locomotion. Recently, his work has expanded to explore how Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can enable true generalist robotics. He currently leads the whole-body control team, developing teleoperation solutions and integrating Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with humanoid robots.