Embodied Reasoning Model

A multimodal model specialized in understanding the physical world and planning tasks, often called a robot's ‘brain’.

An embodied reasoning model is a multimodal large model with strengthened spatial understanding and task planning; it generally does not output joint actions directly, but instead answers questions like where something is, where to grasp it, what step comes next, and whether a step is done, outputting pointing coordinates, trajectories, or a step-by-step plan for an execution layer to carry out. The representative example is Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER, released in March 2025 (ER stands for embodied reasoning); the newest version listed on the official site is currently ER 2. In China, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) has its RoboBrain series. This division of labor is commonly called, in China's robotics industry, a “brain-cerebellum” architecture: the “brain” is the reasoning model responsible for understanding and planning, and the “cerebellum” is the lower-level module responsible for motor control and skill execution. Compared with a dual-system architecture, the brain and cerebellum are more often trained separately and connected through an interface, rather than jointly.

ExampleIn the Gemini Robotics 1.5 pairing, ER 1.5 acts as the “brain”: it can call Google Search to look up local recycling rules, break the task into steps, and hand each step's natural-language instruction to the VLA model, Gemini Robotics 1.5, to carry out the pick-and-place actions.

Also called

ER, Embodied Brain Model, Embodied Brain, ER Model, Brain

Related

Embodied Reasoning · Dual-System Architecture (System 1 / System 2) · Hierarchical Architecture · Gemini Robotics-ER · RoboBrain · Vision-Language-Action Model

Sources

Gemini Robotics 1.5 brings AI agents into the physical world (Google DeepMind)
Gemini Robotics 模型页 (Google DeepMind) (Chinese)
RoboOS: A Hierarchical Embodied Framework for Cross-Embodiment and Multi-Agent Collaboration (arXiv 2505.03673)

As of

2026-09