A human clearing junk out of an attic can often guess the contents of a box simply by picking it up and giving it a shake, without the need to see what's inside. Researchers from MIT, Amazon Robotics, ...

When it comes to navigating their surroundings, machines have a natural disadvantage compared to humans. To help hone the visual perception abilities they need to understand the world, researchers ...

Imagine a coffee cup sitting on a table. Now, imagine a book partially obscuring the cup. As humans, we still know what the coffee cup is even though we can't see all of it. But a robot might be ...

Engineers developed a system that helps robots quickly map a scene and identify items they need to complete a set of tasks. Imagine having to straighten up a messy kitchen, starting with a counter ...

A soft robotic system uses liquid crystal elastomers to merge shape shifting, gripping, and color change, demonstrating fully integrated motion and optical feedback within a single flexible material. ...

A new AI technique enables a robot to develop complex plans for manipulating an object using its entire hand, not just fingertips. This model can generate effective plans in about a minute using a ...

When most of us pick up an object, we don’t have to think about how to orient it in our hand. It’s something that comes naturally to us as we learn to navigate the world. That’s something that allows ...

Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming ...