Bot the Builder

PEOPLE CAN save money on furniture by buying parts in a box to assemble at home. But it isn’t always easy to put together a bookshelf or a table correctly. Now engineers in Singapore have built a robot that can assemble a simple IKEA chair from a pile of scattered parts. A 3D camera takes pictures of the chair’s parts while they’re scattered on the floor. That lets the robot map out what it needs. It has two big arms with gripping fingers. Force sensors on the robot’s “wrists” allow it to hold parts delicately or to push them together strongly. Researchers programmed the robot with the sequence of steps for assembling the chair. The robot spent 11 minutes and 20 seconds planning what it would do, from picking up…

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Muse: The Magazine Of Science, Culture, And Smart Laughs For Kids And Children (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2018

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