Enabling Robots to Interpret Surroundings Quickly and Accurately

Imagine having to straighten up a messy kitchen, starting with a counter littered with sauce packets. If your goal is to wipe the counter clean, you might sweep up the packets as a group. If, however, you wanted to first pick out the mustard packets before throwing the rest away, you would sort more discriminately, by sauce type. MIT engineers have developed a method that enables robots to make similarly intuitive, task-relevant decisions.