Scientists Create Robots That Can Assemble IKEA Furniture For You (sciencemag.org) 125
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.
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Hey, if the damn thing can mow the lawn, take out the garbage and have dinner on the table, it's welcome to chase the old lady around the house for while. It'll give me some quality beer and bowling time.
Subtract the "old lady" from this equation and replace her with a young-ish girlfriend that doesn't co-habitate and you've achieved Nirvana. Also, add folding laundry and cleaning toilets to the list.
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what else would the scientist invent to make you useless?
Scientists living vicariously through their inventions.
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Well, yes, but you make it sound like it is the assembly that is the big cost saver.
Furniture tends to be bulky. IKEA saves a lot of money in storage and transportation, the assembly itself isn't that expensive.
If they made the furniture fully assembled they could probably save in on a couple of parts that is necessary to simplify the assembly for the end user.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was more expensive to manufacture the unassembled chair than the preassembled one, but that they save that cost immedia
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And robots at home (Score:5, Funny)
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...
...Wait ! Something went wrong here.
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Well, the robot could just be the furniture. All it has to do is hold still with a sheet of plywood in its claw, voila, instant table
Re:And robots at home (Score:5, Funny)
And I sense here that the business plan is to ship robots at home that will do the assembly for you :
Or IKEA could just provide an assembly area, with helpful robots available. So you checkout, wheel your cart to the assembly area, the robot assembles your furniture, and then you load the ready-to-go furniture into your van or pickup.
This will not only be convenient, but also promote political harmony, since Democrats shop at IKEA while Republicans drive pickup trucks, so they will need to learn to cooperate.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Business Plan? Scientists? (Score:3)
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 s
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It seems to me an AI with the sophistication of Watson should be able to read the instructions, that a trained modern image recognition system should be able to provide part locations, and that a flexible industrial robot should be able to create the appropriate program (including initially unpacking the parts). So it's just a matter of convergence.
captcha: positron
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In this case it appears that the 'Scientists' pre-programmed all the movement to do the assembly from an exact starting setup,
...which is exactly what "assembly instructions" are for humans. I consider myself fairly handy, but I don't think I'd tackle Ikea assembly without my "programming".
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Assembler turtles (Score:2)
...it's assembly turtles all the way down !
Something went wrong? Listen up (Score:2)
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
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That's not really the point of the story. They didn't create these robots because they thought there was a huge need for robots to assemble IKEA furniture. That just made a useful exercise.
The real point is that these robots perform a complex task combining vision, motion planning, and manual dexterity. It's a task designed for humans, not robots. Instead of adapting the task to suit the robots (the normal approach in industry), they required the robots to handle the full complexity of everything a huma
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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.
Re:Missing the point there... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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A popular saying about the prioritization of horses and carts comes to mind.
What a coincidence! (Score:2)
It just so happens that I built a robot that smashes IKEA furniture! ;)
Got to hand it to IKEA (Score:5, Funny)
Those Swedish guys really know how to give you almost all the parts you need to make a bookcase!
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Instead of a bot that puts together the ikea forniture for me I want a bot that designs new furniture for me
Right. So we've got a robot that designs the furniture, another robot that makes the parts, a robot to transport the parts to your home and another robot that assembles the furniture. Why not have one more robot to sit on it, then we wouldn't need you at all.
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Those Swedish guys really know how to give you almost all the parts you need to make a bookcase!
“Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!”
Parsing the instructions is the difficult part! (Score:1)
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.
Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again (Score:2)
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.
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Did the humans use manual Allen keys and screwdrivers, or an electric version? Did the human time include reading the instructions, as I doubt the bot was programmed by feeding the instructions into a slot.
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So you pit robots built for the purpose of building an IKEA chair against humans who have never done it?
By that logic, I can write a program that can beat a human playing Go. Anyone here who never played it and doesn't know the rules? Sit down and play against my program!
Unfair comparison (Score:2)
Imperfect assembly required (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
It would be interesting to see them assemble a larger sample of chairs. Maybe 30 and then see how they can cope with the variation there.
How would they deal with missing parts? Something that's, jokes aside, also a real possibility and is more likely to be encountered with a larger sample.
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How would they deal with missing parts? Something that's, jokes aside, also a real possibility and is more likely to be encountered with a larger sample.
Robot rebellion, possibly with nuclear weapons targeted to Sweden, comes to mind. We might very well be on thin ice with this experiment...
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>holes in that are never going to be totally exact.
Been getting into CNC machining in my spare time and recently had a huge epiphany: Ain't no such thing as exact.
There is *always* tolerance and particle board needs big tolerances. Standard stuff.
Nothing is flat, nothing is round and measurements all have errors. It's how much error your project can tolerate that determines your window of what is acucurate or not.
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My view and practice with any flat pack furniture is to vary from the instructions and apply an appropriate glue on *ANY* surfaces that are in permanent contact.
Assembly time is significantly longer and it needs to be left to dry before use. However the resultant product is vastly more ridged and robust, and consequently lasts much longer.
That said tolerances in CNC machined particle board should be pretty dam good. They always have been in my experience. Of course poor assembly can lead to the belief that
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instead of those two women who were more interested in smiling and laughing than knowing how to assemble things.
You have to admit though, the women were better at smiling and laughing than the robot was.
Go homo sapiens!
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All 50 screws are tightened the same way. Use a torque driver, you luddite!
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All 50 screws are tightened the same way. Use a torque driver, you luddite!
I guess you've never assembled Ikea furniture before. I've driven in 30 screws on the lowest torque setting only to have the 31st strip out spectacularly. I usually do the final tightening by hand for this reason.
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Don't use a drill; use a torque driver [amazon.com]. A power drill with a torque limiter is basically a weak impact wrench.
The only drawback is (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The only drawback is (Score:5, Funny)
You have to assemble the robot yourself.
There is a robot for that.
Re:The only drawback is (Score:5, Funny)
It's robots all the way down.
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You have to assemble the robot yourself.
There is a robot for that.
And thus Skynet was born
Easier for a robot (Score:2)
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And thus, Frankenchair was born.
Most Humans?!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Having witnessed humans assemble IKEA furniture I can testify that this robot achievement is far more impressive than the aim of sentience.
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Ikea furniture in general and their more complicated pieces in particular != a 6 piece simple chair.
The claim in the /. extract is "Most Humans". Neither the video in TFA nor your anecdotal reference with no data on what was being assembled or the population doing the assembly establish that any more than seeing any category of people (women, men, young, old, blondes, brunettes, cars, motorcycle, etc) driving badly infers that most people of that category drive badly.
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Actually that was a joke. Are you sure you're not an AI yourself? I mean, would you know?
Yes, that was another joke.
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Ahhh... a not funny joke by someone confusing robots and AI. Now _that_ sounds like something an AI would come up with.
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Sorry but I said it first.
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Yeah but you're the not-funny AI.
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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.
Because, for some reason, tons of people want to act like assembling IKEA furniture is some incredible, impossible task that no one can ever decently do right without taking an entire weekend. So of course let's act like these robots are a genius solving super puzzles.
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Because, for some reason, tons of people want to act like assembling IKEA furniture is some incredible, impossible task that no one can ever decently do right without taking an entire weekend. So of course let's act like these robots are a genius solving super puzzles.
Kinda like the notion that setting the clock on your oven is some impossible task that requires the combined intellect of all the world's finest thinkers.
Finally (Score:2)
A von Neumann machine.
Background music in video of making furniture (Score:1)
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
We're Doomed (Score:2)
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If "a task beyond 90% of humanity" is the turning point of doom, we were doomed the moment the first computer managed to solve an integral.
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A task beyond 90% of humanity has just been perfected by robots, and done far faster than humanly possible
The more alarming thing is how humans with all their flaws can more intelligently design something the exceeds our own capabilities. Speaks volumes about the nature of an "intelligent designer" for humans.
Skyentists (Score:1)
We have robots assembling cars, engines and what not, but hey look at what this new scientific achievement.... robots assembling furniture.
Is this really new? (Score:2)
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...
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The difference is not the complexity of the parts but the nonstandard position and form. IKEA is notorious for giving you parts that only kinda-sorta fit together. Some holes aren't quite drilled far enough, some parts only fit when you whack them into place... And the parts that you pour out of the box roll anywhere. There isn't a conveyor belt feeding screws into a robot that then puts its arm at position xyz and screws it for exactly 5 and 3/7 rotations because at that position is the hole and it needs t
But robots could assemble CARS in the 1980s (Score:2)
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 [youtube.com]
Robots packing beers in cartons [youtube.com]
Does the robot has a free arm? (Score:2)
But the robots come in kitset form... (Score:2)
And the robot comes flatpack (Score:2)
Obligatory Asimov (Score:2)
Insert Knob A in Hole B [wikipedia.org]
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Insert Knob A in Hole B [wikipedia.org]
Direct link, [archive.org] in case you want to read the one-page story unspoiled.
Video (Score:2)
Not that impressive (Score:2)
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Nothing new (Score:2)
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.
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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."
This is different. It starts with unknown parts lying on the floor in unknown positions a
Still not new (Score:2)
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?
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Do the Robots come with assembly instructions? (Score:2)
I think there was an AC Clarke story about this.
Oh, come on! (Score:2)
Most humans? (Score:1)
I call bullshit.
Not enough poor and uneducated.
A line has been crossed (Score:2)
A robot that can assemble IKEA furniture must be fully self-aware and will probably be running for President in 2020.
Does the robot read the instructions? (Score:1)
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"
When the robots can do it all, including read (Score:3)
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
The only problem is... (Score:2)
Borderlands (Score:2)
" I'm gonna have to build you an extra arm just for high-fives! "
/ borderlands 2
call me when robots can read the IKEA instructions (Score:2)
This is the singularity (Score:1)
That's Pretty Cool But Stop Giving Scientists Cred (Score:2)
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
whatever (Score:2)