How to build a robot that "sees" with $100 and TensorFlow

Object recognition is one of the most exciting areas in machine learning right now. Computers have been able to recognize objects like faces or cats reliably for quite a while, but recognizing arbitrary objects within a larger image has been the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence. Maybe the real surprise is that human brains recognize objects so well. We effortlessly convert photons bouncing off objects at slightly different frequencies into a spectacularly rich set of information about the world around us. Machine learning still struggles with these simple tasks, but in the past few years, it's gotten much better.