Pump jacks and pipelines clutter the Elk Hills oil field of California, a scrubby stretch of land in the southern Central Valley that rests above one of the nation’s richest deposits of fossil fuels. Oil production has been steadily declining in the state for decades, as tech jobs have boomed and...

Robots that can do many of the things humans do in the home—folding laundry, cooking meals, cleaning—have been a dream of robotics research since the inception of the field in the 1950s.  While engineers have made great progress in getting robots to work in tightly controlled environments like...