A robot has been programmed to assemble Ikea furniture — without cursing, stomping or hurling insults at the international home products manufacturer.
Engineers at Nanyang Technological University accepted the challenge to construct an Ikea Stefan chair using a 3-D camera and two industrial robot arms fitted with grippers and force sensors. It took 21 minutes to assemble the chair.
The results were published Wednesday in Science Robotics.
“What the robot does is to first figure out where exactly is the original position of the frame,” engineer Quang-Cuong Pham explained, Wired reported. “And then calculates the motion of the two arms automatically to go and grasp it and transport it.”
MIT Technology Review referred to the feat as being “equivalent to the moon landings for robotics,” because although the skills to put the furniture together are fairly straightforward, they’re also immensely complex in their individual tasks.
Pham wants to take the task even further in the future: He wants to see if the robots can assemble the furniture using only a photo of the finished product as a guide.
Asked if the robot could someday help humans struggling to assemble the furniture, Pham said, “I don’t think it is in Ikea’s business model to have robots assemble their chairs. In the next 10 to 20 years, people will still be sweating over flat-pack furniture,” The Guardian reported.
Twitter users had some questions about a robot that can assemble Ikea furniture.
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