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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.
Those Swedish guys really know how to give you almost all the parts you need to make a bookcase!
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.
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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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.
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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.
Assembly and trasport costs for a 3500€ kitcken bought at IKEA are 629€ like 18% more if you buy the parts, tansport and build yourself. For generic furniture the costs for transport and assembly are 369€ for 3500€ or 10% of the cost. Almost all cheap furniture is sold to be assembled, especially kitchens, becaude the costs of handle already build furniture is higher: if you havto relocate, most of the time it's better to disassemble tables and cupboard rather than have a lot of unused space.
IKEA is cheaper because the customer does the assembly at home.
Actually, IKEA is cheaper because they take advantage of economies of scale. A Vandenfloog is the same no matter if it's sold in Australia, Germany or Canada. Secondly its cheaper because they design to a price. Literally. IKEA designers are given £75 and told to make a desk.
Not much is saved in the construction, the benefit of flat packed furniture means I can get a chest of drawers home in my coupe instead of having to rent a van.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
IKEA is cheaper because the customer does the assembly at home.
Um, no.
IKEA is cheaper because unassembled furniture is much smaller than assembled furniture.
This saves a hell of a lot in transport+storage and customers can fit it in their car instead of paying for delivery.
No sig today...
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?
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