And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog.

Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3-D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.

To start, the researchers give the pair of robot arms some basic instructions—like those cartoony illustrations, but in code. This piece goes first into this other piece, then this other, etc. Then they place the pieces in a random pattern front of the robots, which eyeball the wood with the 3-D camera. So the researchers give the robots a list of tasks, then the robots take it from there.

“What the robot does is to first figure out where exactly is the original position of the frame,” says engineer Quang-Cuong Pham of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, “and then calculates the motion of the two arms automatically to go and grasp it and transport it.”

As one arm grasps, say, the back of the chair, the other arm picks up one of those infernal wooden pegs and tries inserting it into a hole at the joint. That 3-D camera only has an accuracy of a few millimeters, so the robot has to feel around. The robot makes swirling motions around the hole, and when it feels the force pattern change, it knows the peg has dropped in slightly, then will apply more force to fully insert the thing.

This, though, is where the robot tends to have problems. If it hasn’t scanned the hole accurately enough, it might start swirling too far away—all the way over the edge of the piece. “Then the changes in force pattern are the same, so it would think that it has found the hole and it would go and insert in the void,” says Pham.