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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".
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.
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.
Strange, the IKEA instructions tend to be fairly good. Perhaps because they have people actually testing them?
The only real time I just "dove in" was when there was very little provided other than a quick-start guide with the rest of the documentation on PDF somewhere. In which case reading the docs is more work than just diving in. But since IKEA, Nintendo and others provide full printed docs, I tend to read them because it's a lot easier to sit down with the thing and the manual.
Hell, the IKEA ones tend to be printed on large paper that sits flat and shows a lot of detail, rather than cost save and print it on tiny slips where reproduction is poor and details become smudges.
Oh I know the problem! IKEA manuals assume you have a brain! That's it., the manuals don't hand hold you through the process. You have to figure out which way a piece is supposed to go (to hide the unlaminated surface and figure out which way is up). You also have to interpret drawings that assume a working knowledge of the tools and parts that came in the kit. The instructions are too intellectual for most of the population!
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??").