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The hardest known human task has now been mastered by robots... assembling IKEA furniture (archive):
A team from Nanyang Technological University programmed a robot to create and execute a plan to piece together most of Ikea's $25 solid-pine Stefan chair on its own, calling on a medley of human skills to do so. The researchers explained their work in a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.
"If you think about it, it requires perception, it requires you to plan a motion, it requires control between the robot and the environment, it requires transporting an object with two arms simultaneously," said Dr. Quang-Cuong Pham, an assistant professor of engineering at the university and one of the paper's authors. "Because this task requires so many interesting skills for robots, we felt that it could be a good project to push our capabilities to the limit."
He and his Nanyang colleagues who worked on the study, Francisco Suárez-Ruiz and Xian Zhou, aren't alone. In recent years, a handful of others have set out to teach robots to assemble Ikea furniture, a task that can mimic the manipulations robots can or may someday perform on factory floors and that involves a brand many know all too well. "It's something that almost everybody is familiar with and almost everybody hates doing," said Ross A. Knepper, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, whose research focuses on human-robot interaction.
In 2013, Mr. Knepper was part of a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that presented a paper on its work in the area, describing the "IkeaBot" the team created, which could assemble the company's Lack table on its own.
But chairs, with backs, stretchers and other parts, pose a more complex challenge; hence the interest of the Nanyang researchers. Their robot was made of custom software, a three-dimensional camera, two robotic arms, grippers and force detectors. The team chose only off-the-shelf tools, in order to mirror human biology.
Can robots assemble an IKEA chair? (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aat6385) (DX)
Older: IkeaBot: An autonomous multi-robot coordinated furniture assembly system (DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2013.6630673) (DX)
Related: Ikea Buys "Gig Economy" Company TaskRabbit
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:42PM
One of the big advantages of IKEA furniture is that you can fit the flat pack boxes of unassembled furniture into a small car to take it home.
Preassembled furniture destroys this advantage. Sure, you could pay to have it delivered to your house instead, but that adds cost and you have to wait around your dwelling several hours. Anything that adds cost to IKEA furniture pretty much kills THE number one advantage it has over preassembled furniture. Might as well buy the real thing then.