Except in fanciful movies like 2003's The Matrix Revolutions, where fearsome squid-like robots maneuvered with incredible ease, most robots are too clumsy to move around obstacles at high speeds. This is true in large part because they have trouble judging in the images they "see" just how far ahead obstacles are. This week, however, Stanford computer scientists will unveil a machine vision algorithm that gives robots the ability to approximate distances from single still images.