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One of the hardest tasks for an autonomous robot is dealing with the unfamilar. If you know the -exact- task parameters it is easy to make a robot do it, the second that you change anything (lighting, environment, timing) things tend to go horribly wrong. That's why it's so exciting to see this news out of MIT Technology Review.

It's a robot that will be able to adapt to unstructured environments.

“The robot–called the UMass Mobile Manipulator, or UMan–pushes objects around on a table to see how they move. Once it identifies an object's moving parts, it begins to experiment with it, manipulating it to perform tasks. 'You can imagine a baby playing with a toy and pulling the different parts and seeing what moves how,' says lead author and graduate student Dov Katz, who did the work with Oliver Brock, a professor of computer science.”