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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".
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!
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.
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
How about accomplishing something meaningful for minorities for a change?
They are. Whites will be the minority around 2050.
They're just looking towards the future rather than living in the past where no black, hispanic or asian person ever shoped at an IKEA.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
And they all flunked because the instructions were to add spaces, not to take any away. They all went to summer school with AC, who eventually dropped out, went on "disability" and started writing articles for Huffington Post.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Another white people problem solved by other whites.
How about accomplishing something meaningful for minorities for a change?
I think IKEA sells furniture to those as well.
You know, I keep reading these sorts of things, and it puzzles me. "I've never had an IKEA kit that wasn't screwed up somehow." "I've never had an IKEA instruction set that didn't have a mistake." I've bought I a fair amount of IKEA furniture (and am planning to get more in the near future) and never had any of these problems. I've had exactly one problem with IKEA furniture, and that was my fault (I assembled a shelf piece backwards so that the unfinished edge faced out). What am I doing wrong?
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.
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.
Or, if the human could just relax on the tabletop while the robot screwed it, that would be something.
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..."
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.