Kurt Knutsson talks about a soft, vine-like robot called Sprout that aids safe survivor rescues in collapsed buildings. A Parisian restaurant once promised a pizza experience unlike any other. Order your pizza and, within five minutes, a robot would craft your pie from scratch, no human hands required. This was the vision of Pazzi Robotics, a French startup that merged advanced automation with Italian culinary tradition. For a time, the company seemed poised to redefine how people view pizza.

This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research. For humans, working with deformable objects is not significantly more difficult than handling rigid objects. We learn naturally to shape them, fold them, and manipulate them in different ways and still recognize them. But for robots and artificial intelligence systems, manipulating deformable objects present a huge challenge. Consider the series of steps that a robot must take to shape a ball of dough into pizza crusts.

Not even your local pizza joint is safe from the forward progress of automation. At CES, a Seattle based Picnic showcased its automated pizza-making system that can swiftly assemble and cook pies with minimal human interaction. The system, which consists of three compact modular panels that assemble to form a conveyor belt, is capable of taking a pre-made pizza crust, adorning it with toppings, and cooking the pie to pre-specified doneness. What's even more compelling than the fact the pizza is made with little to no human input, however, is the speed at which Picnic's bot operates. According to CEO Clayton Wood, the bot can churn out an impressive 300 12-inch pizzas every hour when at max capacity.