perhaps a coffee mug, your keys, a toothbrush, a spoon or fork. Now think about how much mental energy you put into each of those activities. Very little, right? For robots though, picking up a variety of shapes poses a significant challenge. Thanks to work carried out at the University of California Berkeley, at least one robot is handily overcoming that challenge.

While you might instinctively know the right place to grab your shoe so that it doesn't fall, robots don't. So the UCB researchers turned to deep learning to help two robotic arms successfully know how to grab odd-shaped items with 99-percent accuracy. Deep learning is a type of automated progression in which a computer is fed a large amount of data so that it can make decisions about new data.