Among advances being achieved in robotics are those that replicate what some TV fiction shows have already long portrayed robots as being able to do —  the day-to-day chores that people would like someone or something else to do for them. Siddharth Srivastava, an associate professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Fulton Schools. With assistance from students, Srivastava is attempting to program robots to do peoples’ laundry, an endeavor being funded by the National Science Foundation. Srivastava notes that robots today perform well in controlled environments, such as factories. The goal of his research is to enable robots to perform reliably in uncontrolled environments. Read more: Dirty, dull or dangerous: Using AI to teach robots to do the jobs we don’t want