Humanoid robot sorts car parts on real Mercedes factory lines

A humanoid robot has been sorting metal parts on active Mercedes-Benz production lines. Google DeepMind and robot maker Apptronik ran the pilot in Kecskemét, Hungary, and Sindelfingen, Germany. The robot, called Apollo 2, was run by a new Google model, Gemini Robotics 2.5. Google DeepMind reports a 96 percent success rate.

What the robot did

The job is called kitting. The robot picked metal parts out of bulk bins and placed them in trays, in the order each vehicle on the assembly line needs them. Two AI models worked together. One, Gemini Robotics ER, watched over the workflow. The other, Gemini Robotics 2.5, controlled the robot's hands and arms.

What the new model is

Gemini Robotics 2.5 is a vision-language-action model. In plain terms, it looks at a scene, understands a spoken or written instruction, and turns that into robot movement. It builds on a version released earlier this year.

Google DeepMind says it tested the model on more than 200 tasks, including serving food with tongs and pipetting liquids. Against the company's own earlier baselines, it reports 30 to 100 percent higher success, depending on the task, and 20 to 30 percent faster completion. The model is meant to work with different robots, not just one.

The safety claims

Google DeepMind says the model controls the robot in real time so it can avoid physical hazards. In its own evaluations, safe task completion improved by 33 percent near obstacles and by 43 percent near people.

The company also published a free test called ASIMOV-Jailbreak on Hugging Face. It holds hundreds of prompts that disguise unsafe requests, to check whether a robot can be tricked into a dangerous action. Google says its Gemini 4 Argon model resists 99.5 percent of them, versus 82 percent for its predecessor, Gemini Robotics ER 2.

What is not known yet

The 96 percent figure and the safety gains come from Google DeepMind, not an outside review. The material does not say how long the pilot ran, how success was counted, or what happened in the other 4 percent of cases. It also gives no word on cost or pricing.

What happens next

Google DeepMind says Gemini Robotics 2.5 is rolling out to partners Agile, Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz. Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas said the models improved significantly within a few weeks of extra training and moved to Mercedes production with minimal performance loss. Nothing in the material points to wider availability yet.