Google’s Carolina Parada Discusses Advancements in Robotics AI | AI in Motion

Embodied AI represents a transformative shift in robotics, moving beyond hard-coded behaviors toward general-purpose systems capable of understanding natural language and physical environments. Visual Language Action (VLA) models enable robots to interpret complex scenes and perform diverse tasks by transferring semantic knowledge into action. Safety remains a multi-layered challenge, requiring not only physical stability but also semantic understanding of human-centric spaces and potential risks. While humanoid form factors receive significant attention, the future of robotics will likely involve a diverse ecosystem of specialized machines. Advancing this field requires overcoming data bottlenecks, improving human-robot interaction through social cues, and developing robust world models to simulate hazardous situations. Carolina Parada, lead of Google DeepMind Robotics, emphasizes that while home-based robotics remains a long-term goal, immediate progress will occur in structured environments like logistics and manufacturing where safety and reliability can be rigorously managed.