MIT Robots Tackle IKEA Flat Packs 

At one point or another, most of us have experienced the clutter of ready-to-assemble IKEA entertainment center components strewn across our living rooms, electric screwdriver and construction diagrams in hand. And the reason is clear: the company offers relatively stylish, easy-to-transport furniture at very cheap prices.

Still, their diagrams may sometimes result in asymmetrical, modern-art style assemblages, which inspired an MIT team who believes robots might be better-suited for the frustrating task.

The product of their efforts, dubbed “IkeaBot” made its debut in a paper presented this week at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). And the robots can do a lot more than just help you interpret the assembly diagrams--they can actually put the furniture together by themselves.

IkeaBot isn’t exactly a single robot, it’s actually an entire assembly system composed of several fully autonomous, cooperative robots. That means that nobody is driving the individual robots around, or delegating certain tasks to one robot versus another.

Perhaps even more impressively, the robots ignore the included instruction manual (just like many Americans), while still being able to correctly put together the pieces. This is because the system is provided a CAD file containing each of the components, and is able to infer where each part is designed to connect with another.

And no, you won’t wind up with a few spare screws or parts once they robots are done, as this is one of the constraints of their “geometric reasoning system” that plans out the assembly process. The reason that this works is because each kit only has one configuration that makes use of every component along with all of its features (such as screw holes).

The software engineering here is clearly impressive, but the hardware shouldn’t go overlooked either. Once the “symbolic planner” has done its job, the robots work together to carefully place and attach each pair of components. It does this with a special arm called the Torq Gripper, which uses two rubber band-joined counter-rotating wheels that can grip almost any shape and then rotate it. A video of the robots in action can be seen below.

And if using such as a robotic arm to assemble furniture fails to impress you, you can look up the similarly designed Canadarm, which is used on the International Space Station.

But let’s face it--we buy IKEA furniture because we can’t afford anything better. So as incredible as these robots are, most IKEA customers aren’t going to chip in the extra dollars for a robotic furniture-assembling slave (unless they happen to be MIT students, of course). Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see if this technology is ever applied to a more fiscally practical end.

Full story at IEEE Spectrum