In the Future, Warehouse Robots Will Learn on Their Own

The robot was perched over a bin filled with random objects, from a box of instant oatmeal to a small toy shark. This two-armed automaton did not recognize any of this stuff, but that did not matter. It reached into the pile and started picking things up, one after another after another. "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. For the typical human, that is an easy task.