IKEA furniture can be tricky to assemble, and apparently robots don’t really do that much better of a job.
A new study from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has found that robots, not surprisingly, tend to struggle with traditionally human tasks of furniture assembly, meaning we’re a long way off from robots doing that work for us, unfortunately, according to a Newser report.
The researchers conducted the study because they want to figure out how to develop a robot that can do such tasks. 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 researchers started small: they had a robot try to put an IKEA chair on its, first by having it insert a small wooden dowel into a hole — something that may sound simple, but is in fact a “highly dextrous task,” according to the report.
The robot pulled it off, but not without running into a number of roadblocks. 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.
Then there is the problem with messy and cluttered environments — robots don’t handle them well, and it illustrates the real difference between the human brain and the current state of robot technology. We can navigate clutter with relative ease, but robots are lost.
But it’s not just that. Despite their reputation for precision, robots don’t have the fine control necessary to assemble small components.
To navigate this problem, the researchers tried to give the robot so-called “grippers” on its arms that would be able to “feel” the dowel, and then use sensors to move the dowel into the hole.
So while the robot eventually pulled it off, it’s still a lot easier if you just do it yourself.