Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 Preview

An arXiv preprint titled "The Yes-Man Syndrome: Benchmarking Abstention in Embodied Robotic Agents" (published May 19, 2026) directly evaluates Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 Preview as an embodied planner. The authors introduce RoboAbstention, a framework built from five robotics datasets that generates 6,069 instructions tes The study reports that defensive prompting and in-context learning interventions dramatically improve ER 1.6 Preview's abstention rate to 93.6%, suggesting the underlying capability exists but is not activated by default. All frontier VLMs tested exhibited significant weaknesses in abstention behavior. These findings h

A Tokonomix model deep-dive (published May 5, 2026, last reviewed May 24, 2026) documents that Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 Preview is a vision-language model for embodied reasoning, designed to interpret sensor data and generate actionable plans for robotic agents in real-world environments. The page confirms a 131,000-toke Crucially, the Tokonomix page flags that the model has been discontinued by the provider and is "no longer available since August 31, 2026," one day before the current date. This deprecation notice has immediate operational impact: developers and researchers relying on OrcaRouter's `google/gemini-robotics-er-1.6-previe

AY-Robots' third-party arena profile covers Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 (also written GR-ER 1.6, `gemini-robotics-er-1.6-preview`) as an incremental embodied-reasoning release from April 2026 with closed weights available through the Gemini API. The page notes that no parameter count, GPU memory, or per-action-step latency The profile reports an instrument-reading benchmark of 86% accuracy (rising to 93% with agentic vision) on industrial gauges and sight glasses, compared with 23% for ER 1.5 and 67% for Gemini 3.0 Flash on the same DeepMind-internal suite. It also identifies Boston Dynamics Spot as a named production deployment for faci