Robots can assemble IKEA furniture

As technology, ai, and robots continue to progress, their next big task looks to be an activity that has sparked many a feud and destructive bout of frustration: assembling furniture. A pair of off-the-shelf arm-shaped machines, combined with a stereoscopic camera capable of 3D images have successfully put together a 19-piece chair… albeit with some help for now.

“Within the next two years, I expect to see a significant improvement in both robotics and AI/pathfinding. But I know you will see significant improvements in how robots interact with machines” – Matthew Wallace, CEO VRSim, Inc.

04.21.2018

IN 1997 it was chess. In 2016 it was the ancient game of Go. Now it seems computers have mastered a task that stretches the human brain to its limit. In a paper just published in Science Robotics, a group of researchers at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, report having managed to get a pair of ordinary industrial robots to assemble most of a piece of flat-pack IKEA furniture.

Read more at The Economist