Apollo

Apollo is the name of a robot shaped like a human. It has arms, legs, and hands, so think of it as a machine with a real physical body that can pick up, carry, and tie objects. The "brain" that decides how this robot moves is a model built by Google DeepMind for robots.

To put it in an analogy, Apollo is like a human body, while the brain model is like the judgment of someone who has passed a driving test. It understands what it sees through cameras and what people say, then decides how to move the hands and arms. Apollo borrowed this brain to take on different challenges, from kitchen chores to sports moves to tidying a garage.

What's interesting is that Apollo itself reported which of these tasks was the hardest. It said tying a knot in a trash bag with its fingertips was far trickier than balancing its whole body, showing that fine hand manipulation is still a major challenge for robots.

You'll see it written like: "Of the three tasks the humanoid robot Apollo performed using its own robotics model, Gemini Robotics 2, the hardest was... the fingertip work of tying a trash bag." Here, Apollo is the name of the robot itself, while Gemini Robotics 2 is the name of the model that drives it. Reading these as distinct is key to following the article's context — mixing them up can make you miss the point.