For a young Tixiao Shan growing up in China, a broken Nintendo 64 controller wasn’t the end of a game—it was the beginning of a journey to understand how electronics work. That drive has since propelled him to the forefront of research on robotic perception. At nonprofit research institute SRI International’s Scene Understanding and Navigation (SUN) Group in Princeton, N.J., he is teaching autonomous machines how to perceive and navigate our messy, unpredictable world. While we marvel at videos.