IN 1997 it was chess. In 2016 it was the ancient game of Go. Now it seems computers have mastered a task that stretches the human brain to its limit. In a paper just published in Science Robotics, a group of researchers at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, report having managed to get a pair of ordinary industrial robots to assemble most of a piece of flat-pack IKEA furniture.
The chair in question was a model called STEFAN. The robots’ job was to assemble the frame. This requires several pieces of dowelling to be inserted into pre-drilled holes before the parts are pressed together. In total, says Pham Quang Cuong, one of the paper’s authors, 19 components are involved.
The robots were off-the-shelf arm-shaped machines of the sort found in factories around the world, combined with a stereoscopic camera that can produce three-dimensional images. A pair of videos released by the researchers show the robot arms making various mistakes, dropping dowelling on the floor or misaligning components, before succeeding at their task after almost nine minutes of slow, careful work.
Even with that...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2HejiAp
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