Liwaiwai Liwaiwai
  • /
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Engineering
    • Architecture
    • Design
    • Software
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • About
Liwaiwai Liwaiwai
  • /
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Engineering
    • Architecture
    • Design
    • Software
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • About
  • Robotics

Robots Can Swim, Fetch, Lift, and Dance. But Can They Assemble an Ikea Chair?

  • May 30, 2019
  • admin

Robotics has come a long way in the past few years. Robots can now fetch items from specific spots in massive warehouses, swim through the ocean to study marine life, and lift 200 times their own weight. They can even perform synchronized dance routines.

But the really big question is—can robots put together an Ikea chair?

A team of engineers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore decided to find out, detailing their work in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics. The team took industrial robot arms and equipped them with parallel grippers, force-detecting sensors, and 3D cameras, and wrote software enabling the souped-up bots to tackle chair assembly. The robots’ starting point was a set of chair parts randomly scattered within reach.

As impressive as the above-mentioned robotic capabilities are, it’s worth noting that they’re mostly limited to a single skill. Putting together furniture, on the other hand, requires using and precisely coordinating multiple skills, including force control, visual localization, hand-eye coordination, and the patience to read each step of the manual without rushing through it and messing everything up.

Indeed, Ikea furniture, while meant to be simple and user-friendly, has left even the best of us scratching our heads and holding a spare oddly-shaped piece of wood as we stare at the desk or bed frame we just put together—or, for the less even-tempered among us, throwing said piece of wood across the room.

It’s a good thing robots don’t have tempers, because it took a few tries for the bots to get the chair assembly right.

Read More  MIT Engineers Devise A Recipe For Improving Any Autonomous Robotic System

Practice makes perfect, though (or in this case, rewriting code makes perfect), and these bots didn’t give up so easily. They had to hone three different skills: identifying which part was which among the scattered, differently-shaped pieces of wood, coordinating their movements to put those pieces in the right place, and knowing how much force to use in various steps of the process (i.e., more force is needed to connect two pieces than to pick up one piece).

A few tries later, the bots were able to assemble the chair from start to finish in about nine minutes.

On the whole, nicely done. But before we applaud the robots’ success too loudly, it’s important to note that they didn’t autonomously assemble the chair. Rather, each step of the process was planned and coded by engineers, down to the millimeter.

However, the team believes this closely-guided chair assembly was just a first step, and they see a not-so-distant future where combining artificial intelligence with advanced robotic capabilities could produce smart bots that would learn to assemble furniture and do other complex tasks on their own.

Future applications mentioned in the paper include electronics and aircraft manufacturing, logistics, and other high-mix, low-volume sectors.

 

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

This article originally appeared on Singularity Hub, a publication of Singularity University.

admin

Related Topics
  • Assembly
  • IKEA
  • Robots
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics

Gods In The Machine? The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence May Result In New Religions

  • March 23, 2023
View Post
  • Robotics

ABB To Expand Robotics Factory In US

  • March 16, 2023
View Post
  • Robotics

Titanic Robots Make Farming More Sustainable

  • March 13, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Data Science
  • Robotics
  • Technology

15 Things We Learned In 2022: Stuffed Puppies, Smart Birds And Self-Healing Robots

  • March 9, 2023
View Post
  • Robotics

Inside Two MIT Students’ Historic BattleBots Runs

  • February 8, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Automation
  • Robotics
  • Technology

Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination

  • January 9, 2023
View Post
  • Robotics

Helping Robots Learn From Each Other

  • December 20, 2022
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Research
  • Robotics

These Smart Mini-Robots Could Soon Clean And Inspect Pipes

  • December 7, 2022

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    Unlocking The Secrets Of ChatGPT: Tips And Tricks For Optimizing Your AI Prompts
    • March 29, 2023
  • 2
    Try Bard And Share Your Feedback
    • March 29, 2023
  • 3
    Google Data Cloud & AI Summit : In Less Than 12 Hours From Now
    • March 29, 2023
  • 4
    Talking Cars: The Role Of Conversational AI In Shaping The Future Of Automobiles
    • March 28, 2023
  • 5
    Document AI Introduces Powerful New Custom Document Classifier To Automate Document Processing
    • March 28, 2023
  • 6
    How AI Can Improve Digital Security
    • March 27, 2023
  • 7
    ChatGPT 4.0 Finally Gets A Joke
    • March 27, 2023
  • 8
    Mr. Cooper Is Improving The Home-buyer Experience With AI And ML
    • March 24, 2023
  • 9
    My First Pull Request At Age 14
    • March 24, 2023
  • 10
    The 5 Podcasts To Check If You Want To Get Up To Speed On AI
    • March 24, 2023

about
About
Hello World!

We are liwaiwai.com. Created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide materials, guides, programming how-tos, and resources relating to artificial intelligence, machine learning and the likes.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any questions, enquiries or would like to sponsor content, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]

Live long & prosper!
Most Popular
  • 1
    GPT-4 : The Latest Milestone From OpenAI
    • March 24, 2023
  • 2
    Ditching Google: The 3 Search Engines That Use AI To Give Results That Are Meaningful
    • March 23, 2023
  • 3
    Peacock: Tackling ML Challenges By Accelerating Skills
    • March 23, 2023
  • 4
    Coop Reduces Food Waste By Forecasting With Google’s AI And Data Cloud
    • March 23, 2023
  • 5
    Gods In The Machine? The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence May Result In New Religions
    • March 23, 2023
  • /
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Engineering
  • About

Input your search keywords and press Enter.