On Valentine’s Day at Soft Robotics in Cambridge, Mass. a staff member places heart-shaped marshmallow Peeps on a conveyor belt. A mechanical arm snatches them up, one by one, setting them gently in a nearby box. It isn’t much of a romantic celebration, really. But it is a triumph of sorts.

Soft Robotics’ RL7 and other grippers can reliably perform some of the physical tasks we do countless times a day but have learned to take for granted. They can pick up a pliable object and put it where it needs to go, all without having to identify the object with computer vision systems, or any kind of pre-programming.

Besides the pink Peeps, the startup’s lab is littered with a bizarre array of objects. There are bags of peanuts and various types of produce on one side, a knockoff Furby and plastic Frozen toys across the room. The lab has the makings of a terrible dollar store, each object chosen for its inconsistency of shape. But the inventory represents a good cross-section of real-world products, he explained.

Founded in 2013, Soft Robotics’ grippers are already being used by manufacturers and retailers to pick and pack everything from chocolates to injection-molded parts to uncooked pizza dough. The grippers don’t look like a human hand. Instead, they are comprised of a cartoonish quartet of rubbery, bright blue fingers that snap onto their target like an octopus clutching its prey.

The name of the company is a nod to both the soft material used to make its grippers and a sub-category in the larger field of robotics. Vause traces his inspiration for the company back to a 2011 paper co-authored by George Whitesides, now a board member at Soft Robotics.

In it, the Harvard professor details a four-legged, X-shaped quadrupedal robot that looked destined to latch onto the face of an unsuspecting passenger in an Alien sequel. “We are interested in a unique class of robots,” the paper explains.That is, soft robots fabricated in materials that do not use a rigid skeleton to provide mechanical strength. The objective of this work is to demonstrate a soft robot that requires only simple design and control to generate mobility.

In order to design a soft robot that could both walk and stretch itself through a centimeter gap under a door, Whitesides looked outside the human tribe for biological inspiration. And like other roboticists before them, Whitesides’ team found that inspiration in the ocean.

Soft robotics sees this as a breakthrough technology that could bring human-like dexterity in a simple compliant form factor to robotics since a traditional robotic gripper has to know exact location of the object. It has to calculate its path, so there’s a lot of numerical calculation called path planning and then there’s sensors on the fingers, so it has to grasp them just enough, but not too much. So it can be very slow and very tedious to solve this.

By 2014, Soft Robotics had its first public prototype. In late 2015, the company made its gripper commercially available, attaching these to the end of third-party industrial robotic arms from companies like ABB.

Since launch, Soft Robotics’ grippers have proven most successful in food shipping, an industry where the product rarely adheres to strict consistency in size and shape. It also helps in the food business when your equipment can simply be hosed down at the end of the day.

Soft Robotics’ cephalopod-inspired robot seems to be gaining traction, however, thanks in no small part to its versatility and minimal set up. Depending on the products the robot will be handling in a given setting, installers need to choose which type of rubbery fingers to attach and adjust the air pressure used to actuate those grippers. Otherwise, the robot is plug-and-play.

The company has managed to overcome the hurdle of bringing a breakthrough technology from the lab to a commercial application in an industrial environment.