It took robots three years to learn to build an IKEA chair- and just 20 minutes to finish it!

Robots can build IKEA chairs now! - Quartz
After years of failed attempts, a research team in Singapore has successfully taught a pair of robots to do something that many humans still can't: build an IKEA chair. The wooden Stefan chair is not the world's first piece of AI-assembled flatpack furniture: Robots at MIT built a simple Lack table in 2013. A chair is more complicated. And while a robot can be programmed to do a single assembly-line task efficiently, mastering all of the small tasks that IKEA assembly requires is a bigger challenge. Some of the same things humans struggle with, like fiddling with bags of screws, dowels, and doodads while trying to distinguish the slight variations in shape, are also difficult for robots. Researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University spent three years programming robots to accomplish the specific tasks necessary to build this particular chair. The next stage will be expanding the machines' intelligence to be able to assemble a chair just by looking at a photograph of the final product Read more