Ziegler reports Gemini Robotics 2.5 use at Mercedes-Benz

In a LinkedIn post, robotics commentator Lukas M. Ziegler said Google DeepMind has released Gemini Robotics 2.5 and partnered with Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz to run Apollo 2 humanoids on active production lines. He identified the sites as Kecskemét, Hungary, and Sindelfingen, Germany. According to Ziegler, the robots autonomously pick metal brackets from bulk bins and place them into sequencing containers in the order required for each vehicle, achieving a 96% success rate.

The reported task is automotive kitting, a specific manipulation workflow rather than a claim of general factory autonomy. Ziegler attributed to Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas the assessment that a few weeks of post-training substantially improved the models, with little performance drop when transferred to Mercedes-Benz production. The post also describes Gemini Robotics 2.5 as working across robot configurations, including Apollo 2 with a five finger, 22-DoF SharpaWave hand and the Franka Robotics Duo with parallel grippers.

Ziegler reported that inference time reasoning guidance helps robots avoid physical hazards, citing improvements in safe task completion of 33% around obstacles and 43% around nearby people. He also described an open source ASIMOV-Jailbreak benchmark for adversarial attacks on robots. In his account, Gemini 4 Argon supported model development by generating thousands of simulated practice runs from a single real world camera scene and building a digital twin. The model also helps researchers analyze failures from video and test fixes in simulation and on hardware, he said. According to the post, Gemini Robotics 2.5 is rolling out to robotics partners.

Source: Lukas M. Ziegler on LinkedIn