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Robot Assembles Ikea Furniture
- xixixao 9y agoFull video: https://youtu.be/Jec2Z3CkBGM https://youtu.be/Jec2Z3CkBGM Full assembly 8min 55sec.
- sbierwagen 9y agoLooks like they're using the Robotiq 2-finger gripper: https://robotiq.com/products/2-finger-adaptive-robot-gripper https://robotiq.com/products/2-finger-adaptive-robot-gripper
- kevindong 9y agoI personally enjoy putting together IKEA furniture. It's like a mildly easy puzzle with an end result that you'll use every day. It's very satisfying for me. Admittedly, it's really easy for me to read/interpret the instructions. I could see how assembling furniture would be a challenge if you're not an engineer or something like that.
- tlarkworthy 9y agoTry with two curious toddlers running around throwing the bits everywhere.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoI got two words for you: ziplock bags.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoPutting toddlers in ziplock bags would cause a pretty serious asphyxiation risk.
- bazooka_penguin 9y agoYou cant just Ziploc babies like that!
- kazinator 9y agoHow is it a puzzle if you read the instructions?
- abawany 9y agoIME, there isn't much reading - one follows sometimes sub-optimal pictures to determine the initial state for a step and the final outcome/exit criterion for the same.
- kazinator 9y agoAnyway; it's more fun to just look at the picture of what the final thing looks like and then deduce how the pieces go together. Next step: don't even do that. Forget you ever saw the thing in the showroom. Just take the pieces and and figure out what they make. Then afterward, compare what you built to photos in the catalog.
- giancarlostoro 9y agoAlways felt like following LEGO instructions.
- ivanhoe 9y agoIt's much more enjoyable (and faster) when you use the proper power tools, instead of those dreaded Allen keys that come with the package...
- ghgfhgfhn 9y agoSecond that, without an electric screwdriver with alan key attachments. Without it packed furniture is a serious pita. With it you feel like an unstoppable cyborg.
- msumpter 9y agoWe furnished our small satellite office in Seattle from IKEA, and putting the supplied alan keys into a drill chuck saved our wrists from hours of torture.
- bamboozled 9y agoAssembling IKEA furniture isn’t hard. People just perceive it to be hard before they even try because it’s a meme.
- Lionsion 9y ago> Assembling IKEA furniture isn’t hard. People just perceive it to be hard before they even try because it’s a meme. People have different kinds of capabilities, and IKEA furniture assembly may be easier for developer/engineer-types than others. The components don't have labels and often require careful inspection to choose the right one, based on illustrations that are also unlabeled and low-resolution. Often times the pieces can be assembled incorrectly in a ways that don't become evident until later, requiring disassembly to correct the mistake. I can easily believe that people who have weaker visual-spacial skills and/or are less detail-oriented would find the assembly hard and frustrating. Someone made a good analogy elsewhere: assembling Ikea furniture has a lot in common with some kinds of puzzles. Some people love puzzles, others tolerate them, and some hate them. That's not "just a meme."
- user5994461 9y agoYet everyone manages to get them assembled fine after a bit of struggle. It's not especially hard to do, it's just a meme to complain about it.
- Lionsion 9y agoI didn't say that assembling the furniture was impossible, just that there's probably some basis to the complaints that may not be experienced equally by everyone.
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoThey are a very successful company, how so if their products really have usability problems of this kind?
- 9y ago
- InclinedPlane 9y agoIKEA assembly is a trivial task, the fact that it's perceived as otherwise is more an indication of the functional illiteracy and lack of basic mechanical knowledge in the population than anything else. Nevertheless, the fact that IKEA furniture is insanely popular would tend to indicate that many do not find assembly to be overly difficult.
- nkrisc 9y agoI suspect that most readers here could assemble IKEA furniture based on a picture of the completed item without ever looking at the instructions. That is probably not true of most people in the general population.
- greymeister 9y agoI assemble by just glancing over the pictures, but that's also how I ended up with a bookshelf where the bottom shelf is facing the wrong direction!
- analogmemory 9y agoNot everyone has an engineer mentality. There’s a reason it’s become a meme, some people get honestly stumped by the instructions. Lack tables are easy and so are chairs. I’ve bought some of their larger and more complicated items and would often stare at the instructions cursing.
- majormajor 9y agoFrom what I've seen, it's only tricky for some people because the instructions are shitty - pictures only, low detail, all the parts and fasteners bundled together instead of pre-sorted, etc. A certain amount of trial and error is to be expected. And if it was that hard you wouldn't see so many people with so much Ikea furniture out there. :) The robot was "fed a kind of manual, a set of ordered instructions on how the pieces fit together" - if all it was given was pictures of the real manual, that would be quite cool, but I'd love to see more details here.
- 9y ago
- Animats 9y agoVery nice. Getting the pairs of wooden pins into the holes for all three cross-pieces of the chair is impressive. That's a tough planning and force-feedback problem.
- mlboss 9y agoCan it read the assembly manual too ?
- stcredzero 9y agoIKEA furniture! Why didn't I think of that!? I had been thinking of a task like PC building as a test target for teleoperation. Why isn't teleoperation a more heavily researched area? I suspect that it could be efficiently accomplished with manipulators that are much simpler than human beings or human hands, so long as you add two powerful ingredients: 1) Movable point of view. Basically this could be slaved to the position of a high resolution VR headset. It could even be provided by a tethered drone. We've had teleoperation for a long time, but it has generally been hampered by a static point of view. What if you could crane your neck and look around what you are doing? This greatly improves the intuitiveness and effective bandwidth of the interface. 2) Haptic feedback. If you can feel what's happening, even indirectly, it also greatly improves the quality of the interface. Think of the dexterity you have with a pair of forceps or needle nose pliers, versus the dexterity you'd have with those while your hands are numbed by novacaine. Since such mechanisms would be much simpler than a mimic human arm, they'd be much cheaper. Also, human beings are very adaptable to control tasks and don't really require a precise mimic of human limbs. (Witness the amazing feats of backhoe control you can find on YouTube.)
- gene-h 9y agoThere was a huge amount of teleoperation research done for the DARPA robotics challenge and there still is for things like servicing satellites. Movable points of view and haptic feedback are not enough to solve teleoperation. A big problem with teleoperation is lag and packet loss. A majority of the applications where teleoperation makes sense involve a great distance between the operator and the robot, situations where these two factors become problematic. While a movable view would be useful, the lag between headset motion and camera motion could be nauseating. In the DARPA robotics challenge, competitors were able to create movable views with lag by 3d scanning the environment and streaming the 3d scans. Haptics can greatly degrade with lag. There have been some approaches to predict what the operator is going to do or predict that a collision is going to occur and prevent such things, but they have not been able to decrease the time it takes to complete a task[0]. It is worth noting though that remote surgery has been somewhat successful over high bandwidth communication links. One constraining factor for teleoperation research is that there aren't many applications where it makes sense to do so. The problem is that robots and haptic gear are currently expensive which limits the applications. You need an application where humans cannot go or the labor the operator is doing is more valuable than the cost of transporting the operator there and the robot. Applications where humans can't go are fairly niche. In addition, applications like working inside a non-damaged nuclear reactor or subsea operations tend to involve equipment that has been designed to be serviced by the simplest of teleoperated robots. In the case of nuclear reactors, mechanical and hydraulic remote manipulators are suitable for most operations. Very valuable tasks like robot surgery are rarely done remotely, partially because of how expensive surgical robots are. We could put surgical robots in remote locations, but remote locations have less patients to service, so it's hard to justify the cost of putting robots in a bunch of remote locations versus moving the patients to the hospitals. [0]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7399376/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7399376/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery
- Isamu 9y agoSo Ikea should send you home with a Swedish assembly-bot carrying your boxes. (I'm thinking of something like Bender with an accent, but hey that's just me.)
- ozim 9y agoOk Bender with Swedish accent assembling my furniture. Best I can imagine my apartment ending up in flames, worst my apartment ending up in black hole just after Futurama jingle.
- Gracana 9y agoVery relevant Futurama: https://youtu.be/HowXEBisrkI https://youtu.be/HowXEBisrkI
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoI wonder if ikea is going to fund this and see it through, offering automated assembly assistance either in-store, or install robot arms in the back of a truck to do it at your house.
- nopinsight 9y agoThis is more challenging for robots that it looks to most humans. The phenomenon is called Moravec's paradox. It also explains why no robot is nearly as agile as a mouse, while computers routinely beat human world champions at many ‘complex’ games. "Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility". Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly"." "As Moravec writes: Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- mtw 9y ago"difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility" - hey I can get a robot with vision cameras and a couple of LIDARs to go from point A to B. Better than your one year old.
- jahnu 9y agoMake a robot that can navigate an indoor playground, retrieve an object I asked for and bring it back to me.
- woodpanel 9y ago> Robot Conquers One of the Hardest Human Tasks: Assembling Ikea Furniture Totally off-topic but keeps bugging me everytime I stumble upon it: The decades old cliché that Ikea instructions are tough to understand and the assembly will always fail (at first try). Is this some anti-globalist urban myth? Has anyone claiming this ever looked at the assembly instruction of furniture of smaller companies? Every mid- to high-class designer furniture item I've bought came with instructions that had terrible UX, that were over-detailed, cramped onto one sheet of paper, had way too small print size to read, made it difficult to differentiate screw sizes etc. virtually all of them left you at one point in uncertainty how to interpret the next step, which could cause destruction if done wrong. Some even came with outright wrong instructions. Contrast that not only to the text-free Ikea-pictograms that work across the globe, but also to the thought that went into optimizing the assembling so that complicated "points of no return" are virtually absent.
- tenaciousDaniel 9y agoAbsolutely seconded. People think that because the visualizations are relatively simple in their shapes, then the design itself must have been simple. It's exceedingly difficult to create instructions that work across language and cultural barriers. It takes a tremendous amount of thought and effort, and IKEA is almost certainly the best in the world and deserve recognition for that.
- BurningFrog 9y agoSome call it the Thelonious Monk principle "Simple ain't easy"
- knodi123 9y agoIt's just like the cliché about taco bell food forcing you to spend an excruciating hour on the toilet the next day. I think both myths comes from the same innocent place - that it's fun to take swings at a big guy who won't get hurt or swing back.
- wombatpm 9y agohttps://www.inquisitr.com/2060551/ikea-cabinet-dubbed-the-divorce-maker-due-to-its-32-page-instruction-booklet-and-169-screws/ https://www.inquisitr.com/2060551/ikea-cabinet-dubbed-the-di... However, one Ikea product, the formidable “Liatorp” storage unit, which stands at 7-feet tall, has been dubbed “the divorce maker” by one marriage counselor who says the product’s 32-page instruction manual and 169 screws are enough to test even the most solid relationship.
- gene-h 9y agoThis is a pretty big advancement. Robots have been able to assemble products for years in structured environments with lots of expensive programming, so it has only made sense to use them to assemble lots the same thing, things humans can't touch, or things valuable enough to justify the cost. They have been able to do assembly in an unstructured environment. that is they don't need any markers on the chair pieces and the chair pieces don't need to start in exactly the same place. They still need to do some programming specific to the chair, but the amount of programming they have to do is less. Whereas before one might have to specify the exact motion the arms need to go through or how to pick up one specific part and move it around, they are able to specify the tasks the robot needs to do at a higher level. They do remark that working at this high level is still fairly difficult, but still a very large advancement. The icing on top of the cake is that they were able to do all this with relatively low cost hardware. Now before we can see this approach used in practical applications, they are going to have to improve the reliability of assembling things. If the reliability of manipulating things can be improved, this could be very disruptive. I think that near term, the killer app for this is an autonomous robotic welding cell. In 2012 it was shown that welding work for a vehicle frame could be autonomously planned[0]. Robot manipulation was not good enough at the time, so the robot had to tell the human where to put all the fixtures and pieces to weld and then welded them. The human also had to reorient the parts too. The implication of this work, is that many of the operations they used to make the chair are also applicable to autonomous welding. This could be very disruptive as it could make it practical for robots to do welding for low manufacturing run parts. Low manufacturing run parts tend to be made by human welders now. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cyq28hoOQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cyq28hoOQ4
- horsecaptin 9y agoI can't wait for em' to take care of my kids. "Hardest job in the whole world". Come on, robots! What are you waiting for?
- wjp3 9y agoWe've had that for decades now: television.
- rimliu 9y agoOr for eight years: iPad.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoOr for forever: nannies / grandparents.
- horsecaptin 9y agoTouché =)
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoJust wait until IKEA starts selling self-assembly robots.