CoRL 2026 Preview: DeepMind Foundation Models Sweep Into Robot Control Loops
Developer Paige Bailey (@DynamicWebPaige), after combing through the CoRL 2026 program, found robotics labs plugging Google DeepMind foundation models heavily into control loops, simulation engines, and humanoids. She compiled a themed thread spotlighting the papers and posters she's most excited about.
Confirmed
- Data generation: work using Gemini to find points and Nano Banana to erase robot arms for generating robot training data; GaP (Graph-as-Policy, Spotlight S6) uses Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite as both a coding agent and VLM to synthesize robot computation graphs.
- Autonomous learning: the Spotlight paper RATs (Playful Agentic Robot Learning) has robots inventing tasks without external rewards and accumulating reusable skill libraries.
- Safety: a team did SFT+RL post-training on Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 to achieve safety-thinking, enabling a Unitree G1 to recognize hazards like a child swallowing a pill and intervene in real time.
- Simulation: SimFoundry (Fei-Fei Li's group, Poster S3 #81) automatically reconstructs an interactive, simulation-ready digital twin scene from a single real-world video, for training robot policies.
Why it matters
The list shows foundation models extending from perception and planning into data synthesis, simulation construction, safety reasoning, and other parts of the robotics stack—a pronounced trend at CoRL 2026 worth tracking as the papers officially come out.
2026-11-10 ~ 2026-11-10 · 6 related posts
Primary sources
- [source] CoRL 2026 Preview: Labs Wiring DeepMind Foundation Models Into Robot Control Loops — DynamicWebPaige · 2026-11-10
- CoRL 2026: labs use Gemini + Nano Banana to turn robot demos into training data — DynamicWebPaige · 2026-11-10
- Unitree G1 post-trained with Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 for real-time physical hazard intervention — DynamicWebPaige · 2026-11-10
- GaP Uses Gemini Flash-Lite to Synthesize Robot Policy Graphs; G1 Learns Safety-Thinking — DynamicWebPaige · 2026-11-10
- RATs: robots use Gemini to invent their own play tasks and build reusable code skill libraries — DynamicWebPaige · 2026-11-10
- SimFoundry auto-builds interactive 3D sim scenes from video for robot policy training — DynamicWebPaige · 2026-11-10