In news which will almost certainly give great hope to those among us who lack the mental capacity and base-level manual dexterity to build a simple flatpack chair, researchers in Singapore have successfully compelled a pair of robot arms to build Ikea furniture.
Engineers at Nanyang Technological University used the arms – fitted with grippers and force sensors – and a 3D camera to construct a simple and cheap ‘Stefan‘ chair. You know the chair. Basically every uni student in a sharehouse probably had a Stefan chair, which they use to store clothes and assorted objects until it inevitably collapsed approximately 90 days after it was originally constructed.
The robots completed the job in 20 minutes and 19 seconds, which is technically much slower than a human would do it, but I have also seen simple Ikea construction jobs extend well past the two hour mark, so your results may vary.
Seriously though, this is a major achievement. Even a simple construction Ikea build requires quite a bit of mental calculation on the part of a regular person: not losing the parts, working out how they fit together, guiding small bits into small holes, trying not to break fragile parts. It took the researchers a while to hammer that knowledge into the robots, and they fucked up a lot.
Look, they didn’t actually finish the chair, in the end. They stuck it all together with wooden pegs, but they haven’t got to applying the final bolts – but the researchers are pretty confident they’ll get the gist of that quite soon. “That could take a few more months,” said lead researcher Quang-Cuong Pham. “It’s not significantly more difficult.”
In the meantime, givvus one that can disassemble a Malm bed frame and then successfully reassemble it without introducing an entire symphony of creaks and squeaks. Then and only then will I prostrate to our new robot overlords.
