Watch This Robot Assemble an Ikea Chair

Beloved Ikea's Swedish-inspired home furnishings, merely hate assembling them? A new robot designed by a team of scientists at Nanyang Technological Academy in Singapore may exist able to lend a hand.

Powered past specially coded algorithms and equipped with a 3D camera plus 2 robotic arms with grippers at the ends, the robot can gather Ikea's Stefan chair in most 20 minutes. It took 11 minutes and 21 seconds to independently plan its strategy, 3 seconds to locate the parts, so only 8 minutes and 55 seconds to put the chair together.

Human or not, information technology'due south safe to say that assembling simply about anything from Ikea in less than 20 minutes is a pretty impressive feat. Check out the video below to see the robot in action.

"For a robot, putting together an Ikea chair with such precision is more complex than it looks," Banana Professor Pham Quang Cuong, who led the team from NTU's Schoolhouse of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering that adult the robot, said in a statement. "The job of assembly, which may come naturally to humans, has to be broken down into different steps, such as identifying where the different chair parts are, the strength required to grip the parts, and making sure the robotic arms move without colliding into each other. Through considerable technology effort, we adult algorithms that will enable the robot to take the necessary steps to assemble the chair on its own."

Pham added that the team plans to leverage artificial intelligence applied science to "make the robot more autonomous and so information technology can acquire the different steps of assembling a chair through human demonstration or past reading the didactics manual, or even from an image of the assembled product."

Besides Pham, the team behind this robot included fellow Dr. Francisco Suárez-Ruiz and alumnus Zhou Xian. The scientists detailed their work in a newspaper titled "Can robots assemble an IKEA chair," which was published this week in the journal Scientific discipline Robotics.

About Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag's expert on fettle and smart dwelling products. Educational activity yoga for nearly 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fitness trackers, eye charge per unit monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, forcefulness training machines, treadmills, and more. Angela too tests smart habitation devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to name a few.