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."

Comments

Re:Dante's Inferno

[slim]

I'm always tremendously impressed by the accuracy of Ikea instructions, and the little tricks they put into the design to make it more foolproof. I've bought flatpack furniture from other sources, and there tends to be much more to go wrong. Ikea do things like ensure that screws and screw-holes won't line up if you try to join the wrong two parts.

Ikea seem to iterate their designs (the ones they don't phase out) to make them easier to assemble, and cheaper to produce. When I first bought Billy shelving, over a decade ago, it was uniformly laminated. When I bought some more, years later, they'd ascertained which surfaces would be concealed, and used non-matching laminate (presumably cheap, remaindered stock) for those parts.