It does not take much to confuse some robots. A machine might be great at handling a simple object like a box, yet when it tries to work with a more irregular shape like a banana, it often fails.

But help is at hand. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) and Idiap Research Institute have developed a new approach that lets robots more reliably manipulate a variety of different shapes by teaching them to follow the unique geometry of any object they encounter.

Their work is detailed in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.