Slashdot Mirror
Teachable Robot Helps Assemble IKEA Furniture
cylonlover writes "Teaching a robot how to deal with real-world problems is a challenging task. There has been much progress in building robots that can precisely repeat individual tasks with a level of speed and accuracy impossible for human craftspeople. But there are many more tasks that could be done if robots could be supplied with even a limited amount of judgment. A robotics group led by Professor Sylvain Calinon at the Italian Institute of Technology is making progress in solving this problem and has developed a robot whose purpose in life is to help a person build an IKEA table."
If they could now re-design the robot so that it could be shipped in flat boxes and assembled with an allen key, then that would be a huge step forward. Oh wait...
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
The bad news is that you need to first assemble the robot.
Turing test passed!
Homeowner: "I can't even figure out which end is up. Is this the back panel or the side panel? Or neither?"
Robot: "Searching... here is... IKEA instruction video."
(later)
Homeowner: "This f***ing thing is missing some screws! How am I ever going to find the correct part?"
Robot: "Searching... here is... IKEA customer support number."
The Italian Institute of Technology has "developed a robot whose purpose in life is to help a person build an IKEA table." and effectively traversing Dante's 9 circles of hell. Bravo!
i mean isn't that the only difficulty of assembling ikea furniture? reading the manual instead of just diving in and hoping you'll figure it out yourself?
of course, then the issue would become how would people be able to comprehend how this bot works, if they don't read manuals, so we'd need a bot to help you read the manual for this bot, but...
hmm, this 'll never work!
A teacher put this problem on a board:
Add spaces and punctuation to make a sentence:
mary chos eisl amab adre ligi onas herp rese ntat iont opic
The conservative student came forward and wrote: Mary chose Islam, a bad religion, as her presentation topic.
The liberal student came forward ans wrote: Mary chose "Islam: a bad religion?" as her presentation topic.
The Muslim student came forward ans wrote: Mary chose "Islamabad religion" as her presentation topic.
The tea party student came forward and said "Duh, I fink it's some sort of code"!
Another white people problem solved by other whites.
How about accomplishing something meaningful for minorities for a change?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The wanted to have it learn how to solve the Riemann hypothesis, but decided to go with a more difficult task instead.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
They took the jobs of auto plant workers, and I said nothing, but I'll be damned if they will take my place in the family as "guy who assembles stuff"!
What does it do when it doesn't get all of the pieces in the box?
difficult to engineer than most people think. tasks involved in ikea assembly are uniquely human and should be given substantial consideration in my opinion. Features id like to see in this robot are:
1. the ability to identify the product as an exclusive export of the country of sweden, despite gratuitous labeling that confirms its chinese origin
2. capable of roaming inside an ikea store for more than 4 hours while a simulated 'wife' process randomly generates and discards a database of product selections
3. a packing and sorting method to attach an ikea product to or inside of a vehicle in such a manner as to require its occupants to either hold it with their hands or contort out of its way for a transit duration of no less than 25 minutes.
4. the ability to process the most difficult or time consuming outcomes of manufacturing the product. this should be done while exposed to both the instruction manual, and the tiny wrench included.
5. the ability to dynamically generate explitives in realtime while constructing the product. this is important as ive found most ikea furnature will not assemble properly unless confronted with a broad range of offensive, confusing and nonsensical phrases.
6. the ability to expound historical facts about the country of sweden while consuming confections and "meat balls" inside an actual ikea. for this to work properly the food stuffs must be violently ejected from the rear of the robot afterwards.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How about designing a robot whose purpose in life is to help a person 3d print missing screws and bolts from said IKEA tables? That would be useful.
Have officially passed humanity in intelligence.
Who knew the Singularity would begin with IKEA instructions...
I'm imagining the graphical programming language used to feed it instructions....
"I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness" - Leela
It seems to me they taught the robot to perform an almost completely unnecessary task. You might as well leave the tabletop on the floor and then screw in the legs.
Now, if the human would hold the tabletop near the robot, and the robot would pick up the legs and screw them in, that would be something.
a cruel and unusual punisment it was. The robot wars began so.
But can it qualify for a boat loan?
#DeleteChrome
...and that's how I met Tyler Durden.
Intelligent robots have already exceeded my mental ability? I knew it. First it's noodles, then it's IKEA furniture, then it's the world's thermonuclear weapons. Oh, will we ever learn....?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
welcome our new furniture assembling robot overlords
This is a an example of what Adam Carolla refers to as the pussyfication of America in his book titled In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks, just s/America/Whole World/.
Seriously, if assembling IKEA furniture is a "real life problem", then we got much bigger problems. On a side note, wouldn't having to buy a robot defeat the purpose of buying cheap semi-diy semi-permanent furniture?
At the time, I never imagined that a childhood spent playing with a Danish toy would prepare me to someday be quite proficient at assembling Swedish furniture.
The IKEA robots have been combined with the cute robots who persuade people to tell them their innermost secrets.
You'll be able to watch yourself on TV blabbing your innermost secrets while sitting on cheap furniture.
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to put together a table.
How about they spend their time creating a robot that can write meaningful and useful Ikea furniture assembly instructions instead? I could assemble the damn furniture myself if the instructions made any damn sense.
Make a robot that can disassemble a piece of IKEA furniture and reassemble it without it collapsing the next time it's used! Then you have something!
That is all.
So the designs will get more complex, and robots and people will be even more confused.
it could be easily assembled by a robot...rather than design the robot around a human table building design.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I'm glad someone can assemble Ikea furniture!
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
John McCarthy, who coined the term Artificial Intelligence, once said:
"We sent a grant proposal to ARPA a while ago. We proposed to build an AI Robot system that could read the instructions and assemble a Heathkit radio. We estimated the project would take 18 months and cost $87,000."
Everyone sitting in the Stanford AI class laughed.
"It always seems we're just 18 months and $87,000 away from everything in AI..." John concluded.
The year was 1975...
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
To be fair, I have to disagree somewhat.
When I moved into the townhouse our family is in now, I bought a lot of IKEA furniture (vs. trying to deal with dis-assembly and moving of existing stuff that wasn't worth the moving expenses to transport anyway).
As I started putting a number of items together, I realized they have a number of common methods of assembly. For example, a dresser, a nightstand or a bed with drawers underneath generally uses the exact same hardware and the same assembly concepts to build the drawers and attach the needed rails.
They tend to use a similar method for constructing a frame for a bookshelf or the "shell" of a dresser or nightstand too.
So once you've worked with a couple of these common items of theirs, you get pretty proficient with the bulk of assembly of other IKEA products using those concepts (the cogs go in all the larger circular holes, and the wood pegs go in all the medium sized holes that aren't drilled all the way through, while the metal pegs screw into the smaller, adjacent, partially-drilled through holes, etc. etc.)
That doesn't mean anyone complaining about putting IKEA together is an idiot who can barely work the microwave or clothes washer! I bought one of their queen size platform beds with a separate headboard with storage cubbies in it, and the thing was a relative beast to assemble. I easily spent the majority of my day on it. A Malm chest usually comes in one box and you can slap it together in 30 minutes. This was something like 5-6 big boxes worth of parts, and involved some assembly that was a real challenge to do by myself. (Sure, with 2 people, it would be easier -- but you don't always have that second person handy to stand around and hold parts for you throughout the afternoon, as needed.)
This was something like 5-6 big boxes worth of parts, and involved some assembly that was a real challenge to do by myself.
That is besides the point. The IKEA-construction meme revolves around having parts left over and lack of understanding of the intended assembly process.
That is markedly different from construction being difficult when done alone.
Furthermore, I just looked at the type of bed you mentioned and the second page of the assembly instructions actually very intuitively makes clear that assembly should be done with two people:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/brimnes-bed-frame-with-storage__AA-473492-10_pub.pdf
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/mandal-bed-frame-with-storage__AA-261173-9_pub.PDF
You might want to check whether the instructions you have contain a similar indication.