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A robot wood-working team is making carpentry as easy as falling off a log.

Jeffrey Lipton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was inspired to make robots that keep hands away from blades because of a colleague. He used to work as a carpenter’s apprentice under a man who had accidentally cut off each of his thumbs with a saw. Twice.

Lipton and his colleagues at MIT have created a system where users can customise their own designs for anything from a table to a shed. A team of robots cuts out all the parts, and the user puts it together from automatically generated instructions. It is flat-pack furniture, but custom-made.


Two lifting robots pick up a piece of wood, bring it over to a chop saw, and hold it in place while the saw cuts it to size. If you want squiggly edges instead of straight ones, jigsaw robots attached to a customised Roomba vacuum cleaner will take care of it.

Right now, the drill holes for the designs have to be completed by hand, but Lipton and his team are working on an automated drill press and other robotic power tools. They are also working on a way to make the robots put the pieces together once they’re cut down – in previous work, they have used the same robots that lift wood to be chopped in this system to autonomously put together IKEA furniture. The work will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation in May.

Lipton says parts of this system may be commercialised in the next few years. Until then, he says, don’t try it at home. “Please don’t just strap a jigsaw to a Roomba – unless you’re a roboticist.”

Read more: Robot that’s the width of a hair masters Pac-Man and cuts cheese