The amazing and frustrating thing about robots is that they can do almost anything you want them to do, as long as you know how to ask properly. In the not-so-distant past, asking properly meant writing code, and while we’ve thankfully moved beyond that brittle constraint, there’s still an irritatingly inverse correlation between ease of use and complexity of task. AI has promised to change that. The idea is that when AI is embodied within robots—giving AI software a physical presence in the world—those robots will be imbued with reasoning and understanding. This is cutting-edge stuff, though, and while we’ve seen plenty of examples of embodied AI in a research context, finding applications where reasoning robots can provide reliable commercial value has not been easy.

Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legged robots at any appreciable scale; there are now several thousand hard at work. Today the company is announcing that its quadruped robot Spot is now equipped with Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model that brings usability and intelligence to complex tasks. YouTube.com Although this video shows Spot in…