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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)
Turing test passed!
Only if it shows frustration and regularly emits swear words like "what a piece of shit, the fucking holes don't line up".
But the good news is you can use the inevitable left over parts from assembling to robot to replace the missing parts from assembling the furniture.
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"!
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
The bad news is you'll need to buy yet another piece of Ikea furniture, a cabinet to store the robot in.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Oh I know the problem! IKEA manuals assume you have a brain!
This is exactly right.
In reality, assembling IKEA stuff isn't much (if any) harder than assembling a certain LEGO design (which most 8 year old children have very little difficulties with).
The whole bitching about assembling IKEA furniture is nothing more than a popular meme originating from and perpetuated by people who consider everything that requires slightly more mental effort than scratching their ass and operating a TV remote a burden.
These are the same people who find operating a microwave or a washing machine mystifying ("How DO they work??").