The article
"Real world" is a dangerous phrase to talk about when it comes to robots, because robots very seldom find themselves operating alone out there in wild and forlorn places like your living room or office. Autonomy in unstructured environments is an exceptionally difficult problem to tackle, and it gets even harder when you're dealing with multiple robots trying to collaborate on tasks in situations where they might not even be able to talk to each other reliably. MIT has been developing a control program that's able to coordinate multiple robots while dealing with significant uncertainty, and it's quite creative in how it goes about doing it. They've created an algorithm The decisions that MIT's program makes are based on data and statistics that it collects as the system that it manages runs, meaning that (hypothetically) you could just set it up somewhere and let it figure out on its own how to accomplish what it needs to accomplish while compensating for everything that (inevitably) goes wrong.
Future implications
Quite simply, this is could completely change how we use robots. In time we could see bots doing things like construction with little or no human aid. There could be robots that once were once deployed for task too dangerous for humans that could now do so without the ever pressing need for constant, vigilant watch from a human supervisor. Robots would no longer have to solely rely on humans to fix and thing that goes wrong.