This Ikea kitchen is incubating the robots of the future

This week, the computer chip company Nvidia opened a new robotics lab in Seattle. The lab has a lot of what you might expect–loads of electronics and robotic parts, work spaces, and computers everywhere–but the centerpiece is a bit unorthodox: It's an Ikea kitchen. That's because University of Washington robotics professor Dieter Fox, who is on leave from the university to head up this Nvidia lab, believes that the kitchen is the perfect test-bed for the robots of the future. Right now, most commercialized robots are either navigation robots that can deliver items from point A to point B in warehouses, hospitals, hotels, and maybe even urban areas, or they're "manipulation" robots, which are almost entirely found in factories. These robots move objects around, and they're optimized to do so over and over again in a very precise way.