Google DeepMind announces new Cambridge robotics lab on October 15, led by former Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders

Google DeepMind on October 15 announced a new robotics lab in Cambridge, UK, led by former Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders, focused on training foundation models for robots in real environments, humanoid control and multimodal perception-and-decision. The lab will tap the UK academic network including Cambridge, Imperial College London and UCL, with deep collaboration with NVIDIA on GPU compute and the Isaac simulation platform; it plans to hire engineers and researchers in embodied AI, robot control, reinforcement learning and robot safety, working with DeepMind's existing Gemini Robotics group. Saunders led hardware iteration and control algorithms for the Atlas humanoid robot during his tenure at Boston Dynamics; his appointment is seen as a strong signal of Google DeepMind accelerating its push into general-purpose robotics, putting it in direct competition with NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL and Anthropic Mythos in industrial robots and regulated scenarios.