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You are here: Home / AI / Spot the Robot Can Reason, but it can’t hold a can of soda

May 12, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Spot the Robot Can Reason, but it can’t hold a can of soda

Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind announced last month that Spot is now running Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model. The headline is that Spot has been taught to reason. The commercial pitch is industrial inspection: wandering around a facility, reading gauges, spotting spills, deciding what to do when something looks wrong. So far, so good.

Buried in the demo video is a small failure that says more about the architecture than the press release does. Asked to recycle cans in the living room, Spot picks one up sideways. If there is any liquid left in the can, it ends up on the carpet. The problem is using a language model to solve something handled by other more primitive layers in the organic world.

Read the complete article…

Filed Under: AI, Embedded, Robotics, Title Post Tagged With: embedded AI

About David Such

David Such is an embedded systems engineer and Director of Reefwing Software, based in Sydney, Australia. He develops IoT devices, robotics platforms, and drone flight control systems, with a focus on deploying intelligence on resource-constrained hardware.

David has over 30 years of industry experience spanning embedded development, systems engineering, and senior leadership. He has held executive roles including Managing Director of Serco Australia and senior management positions at Honeywell and Tyco. He was an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, where he mentored aspiring entrepreneurs through the Business Industry Mentoring Program and the Lean Startup course in the Faculty of Business.

His open-source sensor fusion and flight controller libraries, published under the Reefwing Software organisation on GitHub, are used by embedded developers and robotics hobbyists worldwide. He writes extensively on embedded AI, sensor systems, and edge computing across several publications on Medium, where his technical articles have built a substantial following among hardware engineers working at the edge.

David holds a BE in Electrical Engineering, a BSc in Computing Science and Physics, a BAppSc, and an MBA in Strategy.

Embedded AI: A Practical Guide to Building Intelligence on Microcontrollers is his first book with No Starch Press.

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