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"It figures out the best way to grab each object, right from the middle of the clutter," said Jeff Mahler, one of the researchers developing the robot inside a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Inside Amazon's massive distribution centers -- where sorting through stuff is the primary task -- armies of humans still do most of the work. The Berkeley robot was all the more remarkable because it could grab stuff it had never seen before. Mr. Mahler and the rest of the Berkeley team trained the machine by showing it hundreds of purely digital objects, and after that training, it could pick up items that weren't represented in its digital data set.