Agile Robots becomes the latest robotics company to partner with Google DeepMind | TechCrunch

Agile Robots has landed a partnership with Google DeepMind to develop robots with the artificial intelligence research lab, the latest in a string of robotics companies to do so.

Munich, Germany-based Agile Robots announced it entered into a strategic research partnership with Google DeepMind on Tuesday. The partnership involves Agile Robots implementing Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics foundation models into its bots and the data being collected by the robots used to improve the underlying Gemini AI models.

The companies will work together to test, fine-tune, and deploy robots that use Gemini foundation models in industrial use cases across sectors, including electronics manufacturing, automotive, data centers, and logistics.

“Agile Robots has already installed over 20,000 robotics solutions worldwide, proving intelligent automation at scale,” Zhaopeng Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Agile Robots, said in the deal’s press release. “The huge opportunity ahead lies in autonomous, intelligent production systems that can transform entire industries. Integrating Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics models into our robotic solutions positions us at the cutting edge of this rapidly growing market.”

A spokesperson said the deal was long term but declined to share further details about duration or pricing.

Agile Robots was founded in 2018 and has raised more than $270 million in venture capital funding from investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund, Chinese hardware company Xiaomi, and Midas Group, among others.

It’s just the latest robotics hardware company to land a partnership with Google DeepMind to advance its tech.

Earlier this year, Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics, the maker of the famous dog-like Spot robot, announced that it was entering a partnership with Google DeepMind to use the company’s AI foundation models to help develop its upcoming humanoid robot Atlas. Boston Dynamics was previously owned by Google from 2013 to 2017.

Broadly, robotic partnerships are on the rise this year. German robotics startup Neura Robotics announced a partnership with Qualcomm in early March that involves Neura Robotics using Qualcomm’s recently announced IQ10 processor series, designed for mobile robots and humanoids, as reference design for future robots.

Robots are incredibly complicated on both the hardware and software side, so these partnerships make a lot of sense. As companies work to develop bots that can operate autonomously, it makes sense for companies with a specific strong suit — whether that’s hardware, dexterity, or software, to name a few — to partner with other companies that have a different expertise.

As many in the industry, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, consider physical AI to be the next frontier for the AI market, these partnerships will likely not only continue, but also accelerate.