Scientists found a way to animate everyday objects and predict your next move, so your stapler is always nearby when you need it.

Jon Reed Managing Editor

Jon covers artificial intelligence. He previously led CNET's home energy and utilities category, with a focus on energy-saving advice, thermostats, and heating and cooling. Jon has more than a decade of experience writing and reporting, including as a statehouse reporter in Columbus, Ohio, a crime reporter in Birmingham, Alabama, and as a mortgage and housing market editor for Time's former personal finance brand, NextAdvisor. When he's not asking people questions, he can usually be found half asleep trying to read a long history book while surrounded by multiple cats. You can reach him at joreed@cnet.com

Expertise Artificial intelligence, home energy, heating and cooling, home technology.

5 min read

Picture this: You're making cookies for a holiday get-together, and things have gotten hectic in the kitchen. You've opened the oven door, donned the oven mitts and grabbed a hot metal tray of warm snickerdoodles. You turn around to place them on the countertop and… whoops, you forgot to prepare something for the tray to rest on. As you weigh your options, you notice that some trivets have started to move out from their storage space on the counter. They're rolling, on their own, right into place.

It seems like magic, like something out of Beauty and the Beast, but it's one possible vision of your future kitchen, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. With the help of cameras, a variety of AI models and some tiny little wheels, ordinary objects can find their way to the exact spot you wanted them to be, without you having to look for them.

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It's easy to picture a robot housekeeper, like Rosie from The Jetsons, but that isn't the only way that robotics and artificial intelligence could theoretically make life easier for you at home or in the office. The same technology could be applied at a much smaller scale to the objects you already interact with regularly -- your coffee mug, your stapler, your kitchen supplies and so on.

"Instead of bringing additional robots into our existing environments, what if the objects that are already there in our homes that we're already familiar with can be both intelligent and robotic?" Violet Han, a Ph.D. student at CMU and lead author of a on the research, said in an interview.