Robots are increasingly being used in manufacturing, agriculture and health care. But programming a team of robots to carry ...

Most robot headlines follow a familiar script: a machine masters one narrow trick in a controlled lab, then comes the bold promise that everything is about to change. I usually tune those stories out.

The team has used this approach to rapidly train the bots in upwards of 60 small, mostly kitchen-based tasks so far – each relatively simple for the average adult human, but each requiring the robots ...