But that future hinges on developing increasingly autonomous robots powered by modern artificial intelligence—an ambitious vision that has motivated many researchers to become startup founders while also attracting billions of dollars in investment.

“When I started maybe about 15 years ago, I led a project team that was focused on autonomy, but in that era, the goal of that team was to just get a robot to navigate from point A to point B,” said Matt Malchano, vice president of software at the robotics company Boston Dynamics based in Waltham, Massachusetts. “And now, when we think of autonomy, we think of this huge space of tasks and things that we can imagine a robot doing on its own.”

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