These robots can help you assemble Ikea furniture
Researchers from California have developed a system that adapts to individual structural preferences. It’s not the first time robots have been trained on Ikea furniture.
Ikea furniture can bring even experienced DIY enthusiasts to white heat inside. Anyone who has not at least once mounted a part the wrong way round or has capitulated in front of the back wall of a Pax cabinet, throw the first screw. The phenomenon has also preoccupied science for some time, or more precisely: robotics. Various research teams train robots that can help assemble Ikea furniture. And not just there.
The recent investigation comes from a team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in Los Angeles. The researchers trained a robotic arm to hand the scientists the next desired component when building an Ikea shelf. The highlight: You didn’t just follow the official assembly instructions and simply taught the robot the work steps. Instead, each of the test subjects improvised the setup. Some have attached all the shelves to one side first, others have screwed the two side panels to a single board first.
The robot was then allowed to help with the second round. As a starting point, he was told which components the test subjects started with. On the basis of this information, the algorithm calculated with a fairly high degree of accuracy which parts are needed next – and handed them to the hard-working do-it-yourselfer. The robot could therefore adapt to their individual working methods and preferences, says one of the researchers involved in an interview with Wired.
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Robots should adapt to human collaboration
Other teams have used Ikea furniture in the past to make their robots smarter. Last year, scientists at the University of Southern California created a virtual simulator in which robots were instructed to build pieces of furniture from various individual parts. Here, too, it was about improvisation: the system should decide which parts fit together based on the nature, weight and structure of individual parts.
Two robots from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore received somewhat more precise instructions in 2018. They managed to be completely autonomous within 20 minutes screwing together an Ikea Stefan chair. With the help of 3D cameras and pressure sensors, the two robots were able to determine how to turn the components and where the holes for the screws are: They were finally able to fasten the screws by making slight oscillating movements.
It will take some time before a robot cobbles together the Billy shelf or the Malm chest of drawers in our home. In fact, the experiments shown are less about the robots assembling furniture in a targeted manner, but more about use in scenarios where work steps can change spontaneously. This is the difference to existing robots in industry, which are programmed to make very specific movements on the assembly line, for example.
But especially when it comes to working with people who are individual in their movements and their way of working, it is important that the robots also react accordingly, according to the researchers. This is why Ikea furniture is so well suited as a training object: No two people assemble the furniture in exactly the same way, even if they follow the instructions.
