{"id":77909,"date":"2018-04-18T13:22:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T20:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/a-robot-does-the-impossible-assembling-an-ikea-chair-without-having-a-meltdown"},"modified":"2018-04-18T13:22:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T20:22:24","slug":"a-robot-does-the-impossible-assembling-an-ikea-chair-without-having-a-meltdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/a-robot-does-the-impossible-assembling-an-ikea-chair-without-having-a-meltdown","title":{"rendered":"A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

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And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot<\/a> has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog.<\/p>\n

Researchers report today<\/a> in Science Robotics<\/em> that they\u2019ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts\u2014two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3D camera\u2014to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs<\/a> we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.<\/p>\n

To start, the researchers give the pair of robot arms some basic instructions\u2014like those cartoony illustrations, but in code. This piece goes first into this other piece, then this other<\/em>, etc. Then they place the pieces in a random pattern front of the robots, which eyeball the wood with the 3D camera. So the researchers give the robots a list of tasks, then the robots take it from there.<\/p>\n

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And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog. Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they\u2019ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts\u2014two industrial [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}