You might not’ve realized it as you groggily rolled out of bed this morning, but you are now living in the future: Roboticists at MIT have created a robot that can autonomously assemble flat-pack IKEA furniture — and just like us, it doesn’t even need to look at the instructions.

This miraculous invention, which will positively revolutionize the humdrum banality of Western weekend, is being shown off at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) by a team from MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory. At this point, you should really watch the video, as words don’t really do IKEABot justice. Skip to the 2:10 mark for some footage of the robots assembling an Lack IKEA table, but the specialized gripper hand that gets demoed at the three-minute mark is probably even more interesting.

The IKEABot is actually a couple of KUKA YouBots, with custom-made gripper hands. These grippers are fashioned out of two contra-rotating wheels that are joined by rubber bands. As you see in the video above, the contrarotation tightens the rubber bands, providing compliant torque for objects of almost any shape or size. According to IEEE Spectrum, the Canadarm — the giant robot arm that Space Shuttles were equipped with — used a similar gripping method.

It is the software, though, that really performs the magic. Basically, the robots are given a CAD file that describes the piece of furniture, in terms of their geometry and screw holes. In the case of the Lack table, the robots know that there’s four identical legs, each with a screw hole, and a table top with four screw holes. Beyond that, the robots are left to their own devices, using a geometric reasoning system and a symbolic planner to work out where each piece goes. For a table, with four interchangable pieces that screw into four interchangable holes, this isn’t all that difficult — but the MIT roboticists say they’re working on software that can assemble more complex furniture, such as the Uppleva all-in-one TV-and-cabinet.

Moving forward, it’s not hard to imagine a future where robots assemble every piece of furniture in your house — or, perhaps, the house itself. Shopping for a new home might be as simple as going to IKEA, picking out a style of home, and then receiving a massive house-sized flat-pack kit a few weeks later, which would then be assembled by an army of robots.

Now read: Is it time to ban autonomous killer robots before it’s too late?