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."

Re:RTFM bot?

[tlhIngan]

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?

Often times the dive-in approach is required at some stage -- even if you RTFM -- due to incompleteness or mistake laden documentation.
  In other words: T M is to F'd to R.

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!