A Robot Teaches Itself to Play Jenga. But This Is No Game

These are a few of the things that give humans debilitating anxiety. Robots can't solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they've engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. This, though, is no game--it's a big step in the daunting quest to get robots to manipulate objects in the real world. The process went like this. The researchers equipped an industrial robot arm with a force sensor in its wrist and a two-pronged manipulator, and sat it down in front of a Jenga tower.