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In the future, a caregiving machine might gently lift an elderly person out of bed in the morning and help them get dressed. A cleaning bot could trundle through a child’s room, picking up scattered objects, depositing toys on shelves, and tucking away dirty laundry. And in a factory, mechanical hands may assemble a next-generation smartphone from its first fragile component to the finishing touch.

These are glimpses of a possible time when humans and robots will live and work side by side. Some of these machines already exist as prototypes, and some are still theoretical. In situations where people experience friction, inconvenience or wasted effort, engineers see opportunity—for robots to perform chores, do tasks we are unable to do, or go places where we cannot.

Realizing such a future poses immense difficulties, however, not the least of which is us. Human beings are wild and unpredictable. Robots, beholden as they are to the rules of their programming, do not handle chaos well. Any robot collaborating or even coexisting with humans must be flexible. It must navigate messes and handle sudden changes in the environment. It must operate safely around excitable small children or delicate older people. Its limbs or manipulators must be sturdy, dexterous, and attached to a stable body chassis that provides a source of power. And to truly become a part of our daily lives, these mechanical helpers will need to be affordable. All told, it’s a steep challenge.

But not necessarily an insurmountable one. To see how close we’re getting to this vision, I visit the Stanford Robotics Center, which has 3,000 square feet for experiments and opened in November 2024 at Stanford University. There, I am greeted by Steve Cousins, the center’s executive director and founder of the company now known as Relay Robotics, which supplies delivery robots to hospitals and hotels. He believes robots will become indispensable to modern life—especially in areas such as caregiving, which will need more workers as the world’s population ages. “Robotics is about helping people,” he says.

In some roles, robots’ abilities can surpass those of the flesh and blood. Yet it’s also true that there are certain jobs only humans ever could or should do. The Stanford Robotics Center is one attempt to probe that boundary and find out just how many tasks of daily life—at home, at work, in medicine, and even underwater—are best offloaded to metal and plastic assistants.

One skill in particular is a significant stumbling block for robots. “The biggest challenge in robotics is contact,” says Oussama Khatib, director of the center. Lots of robots have humanlike hands—but hands are more complex than they seem. Our articulated fingers belong to an appendage built of 27 bones and more than 30 muscles that work in concert. Our sense of touch is actually a synthesis of many senses, relying on cellular receptors that detect pressure and temperature and on proprioception, or our knowledge of our body’s location and motion. Touch and dexterity enable humans to outperform current robots at many tasks: although children often master tying their shoes between the ages of five and seven years, for instance, only machines designed specifically to tie shoelaces can do so at all. Many robots rely not on hands but on “jaw grippers” that bring two opposing fingers toward each other to hold an object in place.

Impressive demonstrations of robotic hands, such as when Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robot was recorded snatching a tennis ball out of the air in 2024, often rely on teleoperation, or remote control. Without a technician guiding Optimus off-screen, playing catch would be out of the question for the robot.

In the early 1960s, the first industrial robot arm—a bulky, 3,000-pound machine—was installed in a General Motors plant in Trenton, N.J. Named Unimate, it was designed for “programmed article transfer,” as its patent describes. In practice, this meant the robot used its gripper to grab and lift hot metal casts from an assembly line. Unimate’s proprioception was crude. A handler had to physically move the arm to put it through any desired motion. It could carry out basic tasks, including hitting a golf ball and pouring a beverage from an open can—which a Unimate robot demonstrated for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show in 1963.

Yet Carson gave the machine’s business end a wide berth. Maintaining a respectful distance from robot arms is, after all, a long-standing norm, part of the structured environments that have helped manufacturing robots succeed for the past 60 years. Moving them out of such orderly domains, as the roboticists at Stanford are trying to do, is hard. Khatib says he and his colleagues are “taking robots to a world that is uncertain—where you don’t know where you’re going exactly and where, when you touch things, you [might] break them.” He seeks inspiration from what he calls human “compliance,” or the way we adapt to our environment by touch and feel. Guided by these principles, he developed a pair of cooperative robot arms equipped with grippers, named Romeo and Juliet.

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