As anyone who has succumbed to lure of cheap Swedish furniture can attest, assembling stuff from IKEA can be an exercise in frustration. Many of the wooden slats connect together via small pins or dowel rods that stick in relatively small holes. You'd think robots might actually be a bit better at it than you. You'd be wrong.

Francisco Suarez-Ruiz and Quang-Cuong Pham at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University decided to see if robots could assemble a chair from IKEA. started their robots off with a simple task: get a robot to reliably drop a dowel rod into an opening on an IKEA chair's wooden slat. The robot itself is basically two arms with grippers, one of which works on the rod and one that holds the slat.

But it turns out the bits and pieces needed to construct an IKEA chair are difficult for robots to accurately manipulate. It turns out the pieces are right at the size limits of what most robots can precisely sense. Essentially, the problem is fine motor control.

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Unfortunately, once the robot figured out how to grip the rod, it couldn't do much with it other than try to push it into something else. Sensors in the robots arm allow it to gauge where the rod is located, and how much force should be applied to get it in the hole. But the robot's sensors aren't perfect. The end result: it still took several tries before the robot arms figured out how to put the two together. As you can see in the video above, it looks like nothing so much as a very, very drunk person trying to put together IKEA furniture (hey, we've all been there, buddy).

The idea is to eventually get robots to fully assemble an IKEA chair on their own. But that's likely a long way off. In the meantime, you're gonna better off trying to put together your new Esbjörn chair by yourself.

Source: Motherboard via MIT Technology Review

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