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.

Dieter Fox thinks cobots, a portmanteau for "collaborative robots," will be a fixture of our future. These bots will operate alongside people, acting as our coworkers, companions, and caretakers. Fox also thinks he knows how to ensure the company he works for, NVIDIA, is the one leading this new era in robotics -- and it all starts with an Ikea kitchen. In November, NVIDIA opened a new AI Robotics Research Lab in Seattle and appointed Fox as its head. The lab already has about a dozen projects in the works, but the main one focuses on teaching a robotic arm to navigate an Ikea kitchen.

For all the recent progress in artificial intelligence, industrial robots remain amazingly dumb and dangerous. Sure, they can perform arduous tasks precisely and repetitively, but they cannot respond to variations in their environment or tackle something new. That severely limits just how useful robots can be in the workplace. Nvidia wants to use machine learning to help solve this problem. The world's leading producer of the specialistcomputer chips that are crucial to artificial intelligenceis opening a new robotics lab in Seattle to make the robots that work alongside humans--co-bots-- smarter and more capable.