Google Takes Leap Forward in Robotics with RT-2

Google DeepMind introduced a successor to its Robotics Transformer model 1 called RT-2, a Transformer-based model trained on text and images from the web, enabling it to directly produce robotic actions.  Unlike chatbots, robots face real-world challenges, requiring a grounding in the physical environment and complex tasks. However, RT-2 is a significant step towards creating more capable and helpful robots, addressing the challenges of time-consuming and expensive training methods used previously. Similar to how language models learn from web data to understand general concepts, RT-2 employs web data to inform and guide robot behaviour.  It is an advancement that extends the capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images as input and generate text. It builds