If there is one good thing about shopping at IKEA, it would be their soft-serve ice cream as well as Swedish meatballs that make me salivate every single time. However, it must also be noted that their furniture, mass produced and all, do require a fair bit of assembly – all part of saving money for you eventually, or so they claim. You can always fork out a little bit extra to have their staff do the assembly for you, but where’s the fun in that, right? Fret not if you feel useless trying to decipher the assembly instructions, as not everyone’s brain is wired in the same manner – even that of a robot, as you will read about.
This particular robot will sport a pair of mechanical arms that are outfitted with basic grippers. They are not able to manipulate objects after they grab hold, although they happen to sport sensors which are able to detect just how much force that the robot is exerting on the objects it grasps, in addition to figuring out the amount of strength that needs to be applied when pushing a couple of parts together. Half a dozen cameras act as its vision system.
Sounds impressive, but the poor robot clearly struggles when it tries to fit a wooden dowel into a hole, making us humans heave a sigh of relief that robots are not going to take over the world – at least not yet.
Filed in . Read more about Ikea. Source: motherboard.vice