IKEA Robot Learns to Assemble Your Furniture: How to Build a Chair Under Six Hours (Video)

Assembling IKEA furniture can be frustrating. You squint at the directions, try to figure out what pieces are depicted in the pictures and, if you're lucky, eventually end up with a chair about six hours after you've started. Despite this, we continue to seek out IKEA products because--and let's be honest--they're affordable and relatively good-looking for the price.

But what if you didn't have to rely on your own furniture-assembling expertise (or lack thereof)? What if, instead, you could enlist the help of a robot? Leonel Rozo, Sylvain Calinon and Darwin Caldwell of the Italian Institute of Technology's Department of Advanced Robotics have created a robot that can use force sensor and a vision tracking system to help hold furniture pieces while human users attach various parts--that's sure to make assembling that table a bit easier.

The robot itself can actually "learn" how to collaborate with the builders. It can automatically determine when to hold pieces stiffly as users screw in parts or when to relax and allow the user to move pieces around. During the video that shows off the new device, the researchers "teach" the robot that the table that they're assembling has four legs and that it will need to hold still while each leg is being attached.

"This behavior is not pre-programmed, but is instead learned by the robot by extracting the regularities of the task from multiple demonstrations," the research team wrote.

The fact that the robot can learn instead of using pre-programmed motions is a huge breakthrough for robotics. It allows the machine to be more versatile in order to help people with a variety of tasks--including putting together that dining room set you got over the weekend.

According to the designers, there's "a need arising for robots that do not just replicate the task on their own, but that also interact with humans in a safe and natural way to accomplish tasks cooperative."

While this robot is certainly useful, it's unlikely that you'll find it in your bedroom helping to assemble those IKEA drawers any time soon. You'll just have to figure out the directions yourself, or bribe your roommate to help.

Want to see the robot in action? Check out the video below, originally appearing here.

A robot learning to collaborate with a user to assemble an IKEA table from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo.