ASSEMBLING flat-pack furniture can be a painful experience. Curses, misinterpreted instructions and "missing" components are all par for the course ? if you're a human, that is. But harassed homeowners can take heart, thanks to a robotic duo that can assemble an Ikea coffee table, all by themselves, albeit rather slowly.
Ross Knepper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised the system so that two cooperating robots can split the task between them. One holds each table leg in position and the other screws it into place with a gripper on the end of its arm. The MIT team employs two mobile robots with arms, called Kuka youBots. The pair follow a robot-friendly blueprint which is automatically generated from the software files that describe the flat-pack furniture you've purchased.
Right now, the robots can only get to work on the Lack range of coffee tables, but the MIT team is planning to expand their repertoire. In a paper due to be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Karlsruhe, Germany, in May, the team says the next step will be to make the system more generic, and to expand the number of furniture kits the robots can assemble.
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