Robots at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have completed a task many humans dread, assembling flat-packed IKEA furniture.
Filtering through pages of instructions and a jumble of screws and bolts to build the low-cost Swedish furniture may soon be a thing of the past given advances in technology, said researchers at the city-state's NTU.
It took the scientists up to three years to program the robots, which are made of arms, grippers, sensors and 3D cameras.
They said it may not take long before such robots who assembled the frame of the IKEA dining chair in around 20 minutes, to fully assemble a piece of furniture from a manual, verbal instruction or by just looking at an image of the finished item.
One of the researchers Quang-Cuong Pham told newsmen that they have achieved a low level capability to teach the robots 'How to do it' and then in the next five to ten years, high level reasoning of what to do for the robots could be done too.
Global business area manager of kitchen and dining at IKEA, Cindy Andersen, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper:
“It’s interesting to see an example of how robots could potentially contribute to our vision of creating a better everyday life for many people. “We are very positive about embracing new technology.”
