A robot unveiled recently is capable of a few jaw-dropping parkour moves, including this effortless-looking backflip. The acrobatic bot was developed by Boston Dynamics, and its agility suggests the company is making rapid progress toward training humanoid machines to navigate complex and challenging environments.

For anyone who watched the DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2015, where an earlier version of the same bot struggled with simple tasks like opening doors and stepping out of a car, the backflip certainly seems like a remarkable advance. It isn’t clear whether the robot can pull off the stunt consistently or adapt to different setups, however.

Boston Dynamics was among several high-profile robotics companies snapped up by Google in whirlwind spending spree in 2014. The company was founded by Marc Raibert, a roboticist who pioneered the development of dynamic balancing algorithms for legged robots and who was previously a professor at MIT. The robots’ remarkable movements sometimes make the machines seem uncannily alive.

Legged robots remain very expensive and difficult to commercialize. So it came as little surprise when Google sold Boston Dynamics to Japan’s Softbank earlier in the year. Still, the company is making advances, such as a four-legged bot called Spot that it also showed off last month. This one shows that the company is making strides in miniaturization and control.

A nimble-fingered picker

AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR ROBOTIC VISION

In another impressive development, Ken Goldberg and colleagues at UC Berkeley demonstrated a robot arm capable of picking up a wide variety of objects. What’s remarkable about the Berkeley bot is that it learned to do this not through careful programming or relentless practice but by studying a large database of virtual objects and grasps. It then used this knowledge to pick up even unfamiliar and awkwardly shaped new things.

Grasping remains one of the biggest challenges in robotics, and the work shows how sophisticated approaches to learning, as well as the capacity for robots to share information via the cloud, could significantly improve manipulation skills for robot arms in factories and warehouses. This, in turn, could lead the technology to be deployed far more widely.

Right Hand Robotics, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is among those pushing the use of picking robots into new areas of work. The startup emerged from stealth mode this year with a novel robot gripper and a cloud platform that lets its robots share information and learn rapidly.

Warehouses seems particularly ripe for robotic disruption, with plenty more companies developing machines to automate the routine elements of this kind of work. Amazon is investing in development of state-of-the-art warehouse bots with a contest that challenges machines to perform the kind of picking work done by thousands of humans at the company’s vast fulfillment centers. This year’s winner, from the Australian Center for Robotic Vision, required just a few images to learn how to pick up a new object. It might not be too long before Amazon’s warehouses, which already use robots to move shelves around, resemble vast money-making robots themselves.

Truly autonomous driving

Waymo, a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, created to commercialize self-driving cars, announced that it would test its automated vehicles without a safety driver behind the wheel. This is a significant landmark, as it suggests that engineers feel the system has reached a certain level of reliability.