Robots are as bad as Humans at Assembling IKEA Furniture

That means even the seemingly endless series of variously-sized wooden dowels that come with IKEA products shouldn’t be a problem for the robot.

While there have been other robots that have built a few IKEA furniture on their own-like the MIT robots that built a Lack table in 2013 (which is pretty much the easiest thing to assemble from the Swedish store)-none have managed to identify and assemble something as complicated as a chair.

Scientists carry out many artificial intelligence experiments to push forward the limits of robotic machines. “This work will continue until completion of all the tasks required for assembling an IKEA chair”, they told Technology Review. A new effort spearheaded by Francisco Suárez-Ruiz and Quang-Cuong Pham of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore shows that even robots, who in addition to their own fine motor skills, were developed by individuals with a few serious engineering degrees, struggle with constructing IKEA furniture. However, they found that when assembling, robots need to put together parts that are small and fragile, and they are not in a structured environment like robots typically require – making it an ideal task for humans, but not so much for robots.

The robot sports six cameras for vision and two six-axis motion arms with parallel grippers that have force sensors. For one, the dowel is very small – so small that the robot had difficulty seeing it. It had the same problem with the hole it was supposed to go into.

When the robots tried to insert the pin, they looked alternately blind, confused, or a bit drunk. The first task was for the robot to use one of its arms to locate and pick up the dowel. Apparently, this technique was not helpful at all and the robots continued to make the same mistakes.

The researchers taught the robot how to put the furniture together by breaking the task down into three mini-tasks.

Robots can be programmed to do particular, predetermined jobs very exactly and very efficiently, but comparatively imprecise and inefficient process of for example building an IKEA chair, just doesn’t fit in the standard modus operandi of robots.