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Verification register Robotics, Autonomy & Spatial

Readiness verdict

Google DeepMind RT-2 (Robotics Transformer 2)

A dated reading of what is claimed, reported, and independently verified in the current evidence.

As of
2026-08-20
Revision
1
Method
v1.3.0

Current reading

Readiness band and full integer triple

AI-assisted assembly · derived results

Readiness band

Emerging

Primary summary from verified readiness

Confidence
65% · stale
Computed at
2026-08-20T10:56:13.569084+00:00
Claimed
20

Public ambition and stated capability

Reported
20

Observed practitioner reporting

Verified
18

Independently supported evidence

Gap
+2

Claimed leads verified

Evidence strength Weak

Decision

What the current evidence supports

Human editorial judgment · 2026-08-20

Track; not yet

Why
RT-2 established the VLA paradigm (robot actions as text tokens output by a web-scale VLM) that every current robot-foundation-model line descends from, but the specific artifact is a July 2023 research demonstration, cloud-TPU-bound at 1-3 Hz, unable to learn new low-level motions, never open-sourced, and architecturally superseded by Gemini Robotics in March 2025 -- so it merits historical/provenance tracking, not active adoption.
Next
Keep RT-2 as the cited founding VLA reference in the register; direct technical evaluation effort stays on its actively-developed descendants already tracked (e.g. Physical Intelligence pi0.7, Gemini Robotics) rather than RT-2 itself, which is not deployable or maintained.

Constraints

Blockers

No named blocker is present in the current public projection.

Evidence summary

Derived counts

AI-assisted assembly

Total
6
Tier 1
0
Tier 2
1
Tier 3
5
Supports
4
Contradicts
1
Context
1
Latest observed
2026-05-01

Counts and dates only. Raw signals, private excerpts, trust records, and internal corpus material are not published here.

Publication record

Revisions

Initial public reading

  1. 2026-08-20 Reading moved from emerging to emerging.

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