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Scientists Create Robots That Can Assemble IKEA Furniture For You (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Although artificial intelligence systems may be able to beat humans at board games, we still have the upper hand when it comes to complicated manual tasks. But now, scientists have created robots that can do something even most humans struggle with: assemble an IKEA chair. Putting together a chair requires a combination of complex movements that, in turn, depends on such skills as vision, limb coordination, and the ability to control force. Until now, that was too much to ask of even a sophisticated robot. But researchers have finally broken the dexterity barrier by combining commercially available hardware, including 3D cameras and force sensors, to build two chair-building bots. To construct their IKEA masterpiece, the robots first took pictures to identify each part of the chair. An algorithm planned the motions the robots needed to manipulate the objects without causing any collisions; two robotic arms then performed those actions in concert. Feedback from force sensors also helped: When the robot needed to insert a pin into a hole, for example, it would slide the pin over the surface until it felt a change in force. The robots were able to put together the chair in a little over 20 minutes, which includes the 11 minutes and 21 seconds of planning time and 8 minutes and 55 seconds of actual assembly. The findings have been reported today in Science Robotics.
what else would the scientist invent to make you useless?
IKEA is cheaper because the customer does the assembly at home.
I, for one, welcome our new furniture-building robot overlords.
It just so happens that I built a robot that smashes IKEA furniture! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Those Swedish guys really know how to give you almost all the parts you need to make a bookcase!
Now if they developed an AI which translates those grotty pictograms into intelligible language, *this* would be progress!
Actually putting these things together is the easy part.
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. ... We challenged several Science staffers to build the same chair, and they beat the robots’ time—but only by 50 seconds."
"Can this robot build an IKEA chair faster than you?"
"Altogether, the robots put together the chair in a little over 20 minutes.
Ikea furniture is great, but imperfect by design. Tolerances are wide, parts vary, and it takes a wack now and then to get the parts into place. This is intentional since it's far, FAR cheaper to build out of particleboard and holes in that are never going to be totally exact.
What is more impressive is an assembly AI that can cope with that. One that can tighten 50 screws slightly differently because they need to be or tweak two pieces so they slot together as intended. Usual laughs aside, Ikea stuff isn't rocket science to assemble as long as you actually pay attention. Their instructions are usually very specific, but no one looks at the details. I've built tons of it and every time I got stuck or confused on some bit it's because i didn't look at the instructions carefully enough and swapped a part/pin/order. Once you figure out their general ways though you can practically ignore the manuals.
Getting a machine to adapt to a repeatable assembly with moderate variations is more impressive than one would first believe. I'm curious how fast round two assembly went and how fast someone who knows how to use an allen key built it instead of those two women who were more interested in smiling and laughing than knowing how to assemble things.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
make furniture from scratch, instead?
Instead of a bot that puts together the ikea forniture for me I want a bot that designs new furniture for me
You have to assemble the robot yourself.
IKEA is cheaper because the customer does the assembly at home.
Yeah.
And I sense here that the business plan is to ship robots at home that will do the assembly for you :
- You still get the cheap flat boxes of furniture from IKEA
- But you delegate the assembly to the robot.
And as you don't constantly need having furniture assembled, you don't actually need to permanently own assembling robots.
You could rent the robots instead.
You could have them shipped to you on the week-end when you plan to buy and assemble new IKEA furniture.
To make things cheaper, the robots could be shipped in cheap flat boxes (it'll just require some quick assembl...
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"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When a piece is missing the robot just has to grab something from its own body and use that as an Ikea component.
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While this is admittedly an achievement, there is a far cry from this to robots being able to assemble general Ikea furniture better than -> Most - humans.
The robots in TFA were matched up with two left thumbed girls who look to have never performed anything manual more complicated than replacing a lightbulb.
The chair in question is only composed of 6 major elements that can only fit together one way and connecting pieces like screws, dowels & such. Not a single element needs nails or a floppy particleboard back that needs to be hammered in or wood screws in non pre-drilled holes. It's almost the simplest example they could find. I've assembled my share of Ikea furniture for 35 years and all of it was more complicated than this.
This isn't robots can do a better job than most humans, it's robots can perform a simple task better than some humans.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
A von Neumann machine.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Off-topic, but I'm curious: Was anyone else annoyed by the background music in the video? Or was I the only one?
If it would have been too empty without some sort of background sound, then I would have preferred the sound of what was happening - the whirring of the robot arms, or the women's voices. But maybe I'm different, and most people prefer music.
I remember one YouTube video of tornado chasers. I wanted to hear the people yelling excitedly, the wind rushing, and the debris hitting buildings. But those sounds were partly hidden by background music, including lots of drums, which really hurt the feeling of being there.
My god, we're doomed, finished, caput. A task beyond 90% of humanity has just been perfected by robots, and done far faster than humanly possible. Next to this warfare is child's play. I'd say to get into your bunkers, but those are probably designed by Ikea and the robots already know their weaknesses.
..and I'm still not forgiving you!
We have robots assembling cars, engines and what not, but hey look at what this new scientific achievement.... robots assembling furniture.
This sounds like a great scientific achievement, but isn't this almost exactly what the automotive industry has been doing for the last, say, 40 years?
Not with chairs, but with the somewhat more complicated automobiles...
For instance Fiat made an infomercial for the Fiat UNO where they were boasting the fact that the unibody was assembled by robots, (And ascketd Michele Alboreto, the F1 driver to drive it!).
I know that both the engine and the bodywork were engineered to make esaier for robots to build it, and on the other hand IKEA chairs are engineered to be built by untrained people.
Robots building metal chairs
Robots packing beers in cartons
You have not met many typical scientists have you.
The 'Business Plan' is 'We think someone will give us some funding money to play with robots assembling furniture'
That is usually where it starts and ends, on a good day.
Note of course that as usual they are not above stretching the claims to the maximum.
In this case it appears that the 'Scientists' pre-programmed all the movement to do the assembly from an exact starting setup,
which means this is more a measure of the boredom and lack of useful work these scientists have than anything else.
So no, These robots will not actually assemble your IKEA furniture, unless it is that exact chair, laid out in that exact way, on a good day with a tail wind.
I guess the robots beat Get Smart's Hymie:
Dr. Ratton: [about Hymie] There's only one thing he isn't able to do.
Mr. Natz: What's that?
Dr. Ratton: Set up a lawn chair.
Does the robot has also a free unused arm to scratch its head for 20 minutes after reading the manual?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
somebody?
And you first have to assemble the robots yourself.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
If you struggle with building flat pack, build this robot instead. Honestly if you can't manage to put ikea stuff together a robot is the last thing you need.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Insert Knob A in Hole B
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Because no one is going to RTFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's really not that hard to put together IKEA furniture, anyone could do it. Now, show me a robot that can correctly pronounce the furniture names and I'll be impressed.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I'll always applaud any engineering feat to develop, calibrate and make that robot do that 'one' thing, like put that single IKEA chair model together. But this is just hot air escaping from a cold window at a tail pipe party. Robotics tasks are and have been quintessential in manufacturing and a gaggle of other industries. Kind of reminds me of shit like this.
Now if there was some machine learning/AI image processing component where learning from video watching the humans put it together 50 seconds faster, it improved each time from it's own data points from before, then I'd be impressed and absolutely creeped out that Jeff Bezos has been right all along.
There were 2 robot arms assembling the chair, but there were 4 human arms on 2 humans. This is a totally non-scientific study!
Will this be on the test?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Until now, that was too much to ask of even a sophisticated robot. But researchers have finally broken the dexterity barrier by combining commercially available hardware, including 3D cameras and force sensors, to build two chair-building bots.
Umm, this is complete bullshit. We've been able to do this for decades. The problem has NEVER been in making robots that could assemble something complex. The problem is doing it for a reasonable cost and with minimal engineering oversight. We use robots to build things FAR more complex than a piece of IKEA furniture and have for a long long time.
Everybody is joking about it (including me) and when you look at what robots do in a car factory, this does not seem to be such an effort. You place the things on the ground and the robot the does pre-designed movement. Done.
But what I think is interesting that the planning is done as well by the robot. I wonder if it uses the manual or just figures things out like a big puzzle, then programs itself to do what need to be done. As the main article is paywalled http://robotics.sciencemag.org... We can only guess. My guess is that it looks up what fits into what and that there are no parts left. As it takes 8 minutes, I am guessing it uses brute force. e.g. It starts with e,g a plank. That has 4 holes in it. It then takes another item and see if that fits. If not, go to the next piece. At a certain moment it will find a plank and a screw. That till it find 4 screws that fit. Now you have a plank with 4 screws sticking out of it.
Take the next object and see if that fits. At some point it does, And then at one moment it has either holes left, or items left that do not fit, so the calculations start from the beginning.
I can also imagine that the reason it can do some, but not all furniture is because it has no idea what to do if there are holes not used. e.g. as they are intended to connect a second part of a bookcase to it.
Thanks to the fact that it is paywalled, no idea if that is correct and we just make a bunch of jokes about it, instead of thinking about it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I think there was an AC Clarke story about this.
Assembling an IKEA chair is, in most cases, trivial. You just have read the instructions, roll up your sleeves and get some physical work done. That's what many struggle with it. It is not that they have difficulties following the instructions to get the job done - rather, they just can't be bothered.
I call bullshit.
Not enough poor and uneducated.
less entitled than your average knuckle dragging Trump Supporter
A robot that can assemble IKEA furniture must be fully self-aware and will probably be running for President in 2020.
I doubt it would be feasible, either, like delivery drones. A lot of engineers seem to have no grasp of pragmatism whatsoever. 'That's cool!' is not good enough.
It wasn't clear whether the robots ingest the assembly instructions as part of their planning, or if they do it by some sort of "measure everything and determine what is a legal topological configuration that is mechanically consistent"
Wait! Something went wrong here
Film freezes
VO: F**k off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Meanwhile, the two girls, after deciding that the video made them look awful at assembling furniture, decided on TWO action plans.
1. Hire a dumb hit man (who happened to be capable of simple math and simple plans) to perform a hit on the group of scientists; but after finding out the supposed motive for the hit, pockets the money, then shoots the cameraman. He leaves his "signature' i.e. his driver's license.
2. The girls design a robot that doesn't shop at IKEA.
I'll be more impressed when the robots can read the swedish/english/chinese directions and assemble it from scratch. I'll be more impressed when it can differentiate between which fasteners are there and to actually use the dumb tools that Ikea provides.
Until then IMO this was an exercise in robotic programming. Maybe Elon Musk can use the software developers to get the Model 3 line moving faster?
#slowNewsDay
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The only problem is, you have to first assemble the robot yourself.
So, how much did the robot have programmed into it about what it was building? I assume it pretty much said "OK, gotta make a chair out of this".
Don't get me wrong, this is definitely some cool stuff. But I think it would be hilarious to give it some random bookshelf or something and see what it builds from the pieces.
Some freaky kind of robot performance art where it builds something with a random collection of pieces, but you won't know what. Give it a different set of pieces every time.
That would be awesome ... up next, on Fox ... Fucking with Robots.
It can assemble it, but can it understand the word-less pictograms that are the IKEA instructions ?
That's by far a more difficult task...
" I'm gonna have to build you an extra arm just for high-fives! "
/ borderlands 2
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
... and assemble the chair. That will be a much more interesting AI benchmark.
We had a good run.
They could get the robots to walk the incredibly stupid maze that is an IKEA store and pick up the carons that are not in the correct spots and then wait in the horribly long lines to go through the cash registers (only one third are open), then I might consider buying from OKEA again. Life is too short to experience the IKEA hell.
That's not what this is about. Traditional robots can build complex things, but only because we've carefully designed the whole assembly process around the robots. "Pick up this part, which is guaranteed to be at exactly this position. Move it to this other position. Insert a screw that is fed directly into the robot. Let the conveyor belt carry it on to the next robot which does some other very specialized task."
While it is true that a lot of robotics is done just the way you describe, I was working with vision systems and pick and place and similar technologies 20 years ago which could deal with a sizeable amount of imprecision with sufficient programming. Robots have been able to deal with work that isn't carefully organized for a long time - it's just usually easier and cheaper to organize the workflow than to program a smarter robot. (that's true of human workflows in general too) I'm sure current stuff is far better than the stuff I used but it's definitely not new. Very cool to see it continue to advance though.
But the real question is price. Having a robot that can do advanced assembly is nice but how many tens of thousands of dollars will it cost? How much engineering time goes into making it do these tasks?
...it's assembly turtles all the way down !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Scientists hypothesize and critically test. They don't really engineer except for the experiments themselves. Their nature, by profession, is to be pessimistic. They try to determine what is or isn't true and why or why not. Scientists are frequently telling engineers and other what will or will not work..
Engineers design things to solve problems. By profession, they must be optimistic. They certainly benefit from knowledge and theories developed by scientists. However, they also need to blow off the scientists' views of what will or will not work. The engineer's work is not to determine what will or will not work but to make work what they need to make work.
Scientists are narrow, dogmatic, and deterministic. Engineers are open minded, creative, and determined.
Engineers built these robots--not scientists.
That should actually be "an absolute minority of humans struggle with".
"Unlike our humans, the chair-building bots were not fully autonomous, as scientists needed to program the sequence of steps they took in advance. " Exciting!
...now let's see it assemble 1,000 chairs pulled from the inventory of multiple stores. Can it cope with damaged parts and missing fasteners?
Attach it to a delivery vehiclea and assemble it in my living room and then drive away?