This 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

This 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