
Robot Assembles Ikea Furniture - nopinsight
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/science/robots-ikea-furniture.html
======
nopinsight
This is more challenging for robots that it looks to most humans. The
phenomenon is called Moravec's paradox.

It also explains why no robot is nearly as agile as a mouse, while computers
routinely beat human world champions at many ‘complex’ games.

"Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics
researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning
requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require
enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans
Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec
writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level
performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or
impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to
perception and mobility".

Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse
engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of
what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple
processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly"."

"As Moravec writes:

Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human
brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how
to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the
thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by
this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious,
sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and
motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought,
though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not
yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so
when we do it."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

~~~
mtw
"difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it
comes to perception and mobility" \- hey I can get a robot with vision cameras
and a couple of LIDARs to go from point A to B. Better than your one year old.

~~~
jahnu
Make a robot that can navigate an indoor playground, retrieve an object I
asked for and bring it back to me.

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stcredzero
IKEA furniture! Why didn't I think of that!? I had been thinking of a task
like PC building as a test target for teleoperation.

Why isn't teleoperation a more heavily researched area? I suspect that it
could be efficiently accomplished with manipulators that are much simpler than
human beings or human hands, so long as you add two powerful ingredients:

1) Movable point of view. Basically this could be slaved to the position of a
high resolution VR headset. It could even be provided by a tethered drone.

We've had teleoperation for a long time, but it has generally been hampered by
a static point of view. What if you could crane your neck and look around what
you are doing? This greatly improves the intuitiveness and effective bandwidth
of the interface.

2) Haptic feedback.

If you can feel what's happening, even indirectly, it also greatly improves
the quality of the interface. Think of the dexterity you have with a pair of
forceps or needle nose pliers, versus the dexterity you'd have with those
while your hands are numbed by novacaine. Since such mechanisms would be much
simpler than a mimic human arm, they'd be much cheaper. Also, human beings are
very adaptable to control tasks and don't really require a precise mimic of
human limbs. (Witness the amazing feats of backhoe control you can find on
YouTube.)

~~~
gene-h
There was a huge amount of teleoperation research done for the DARPA robotics
challenge and there still is for things like servicing satellites. Movable
points of view and haptic feedback are not enough to solve teleoperation. A
big problem with teleoperation is lag and packet loss. A majority of the
applications where teleoperation makes sense involve a great distance between
the operator and the robot, situations where these two factors become
problematic. While a movable view would be useful, the lag between headset
motion and camera motion could be nauseating. In the DARPA robotics challenge,
competitors were able to create movable views with lag by 3d scanning the
environment and streaming the 3d scans.

Haptics can greatly degrade with lag. There have been some approaches to
predict what the operator is going to do or predict that a collision is going
to occur and prevent such things, but they have not been able to decrease the
time it takes to complete a task[0].

It is worth noting though that remote surgery has been somewhat successful
over high bandwidth communication links. One constraining factor for
teleoperation research is that there aren't many applications where it makes
sense to do so. The problem is that robots and haptic gear are currently
expensive which limits the applications. You need an application where humans
cannot go or the labor the operator is doing is more valuable than the cost of
transporting the operator there and the robot. Applications where humans can't
go are fairly niche. In addition, applications like working inside a non-
damaged nuclear reactor or subsea operations tend to involve equipment that
has been designed to be serviced by the simplest of teleoperated robots. In
the case of nuclear reactors, mechanical and hydraulic remote manipulators are
suitable for most operations. Very valuable tasks like robot surgery are
rarely done remotely, partially because of how expensive surgical robots are.
We could put surgical robots in remote locations, but remote locations have
less patients to service, so it's hard to justify the cost of putting robots
in a bunch of remote locations versus moving the patients to the hospitals.

[0][https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7399376/](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7399376/)
[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery)

~~~
stcredzero
_A big problem with teleoperation is lag and packet loss._

JAXA has been looking into this. It seems that highly motivated operators can
tolerate a full second of lag.

 _In the DARPA robotics challenge, competitors were able to create movable
views with lag by 3d scanning the environment and streaming the 3d scans._

That's entirely suitable for a "work bench." In fact, the background might as
well be blanked out and replaced with a synthetic grid.

 _You need an application where humans cannot go or the labor the operator is
doing is more valuable than the cost of transporting the operator there and
the robot._

I can envision many contexts in the upcoming decades where teleoperation is
going to be very useful. The long term health costs of human beings suiting up
to go into environments without protection from radiation could be quite high.

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gene-h
This is a pretty big advancement. Robots have been able to assemble products
for years in structured environments with lots of expensive programming, so it
has only made sense to use them to assemble lots the same thing, things humans
can't touch, or things valuable enough to justify the cost. They have been
able to do assembly in an unstructured environment. that is they don't need
any markers on the chair pieces and the chair pieces don't need to start in
exactly the same place. They still need to do some programming specific to the
chair, but the amount of programming they have to do is less. Whereas before
one might have to specify the exact motion the arms need to go through or how
to pick up one specific part and move it around, they are able to specify the
tasks the robot needs to do at a higher level. They do remark that working at
this high level is still fairly difficult, but still a very large advancement.
The icing on top of the cake is that they were able to do all this with
relatively low cost hardware.

Now before we can see this approach used in practical applications, they are
going to have to improve the reliability of assembling things. If the
reliability of manipulating things can be improved, this could be very
disruptive. I think that near term, the killer app for this is an autonomous
robotic welding cell. In 2012 it was shown that welding work for a vehicle
frame could be autonomously planned[0]. Robot manipulation was not good enough
at the time, so the robot had to tell the human where to put all the fixtures
and pieces to weld and then welded them. The human also had to reorient the
parts too. The implication of this work, is that many of the operations they
used to make the chair are also applicable to autonomous welding. This could
be very disruptive as it could make it practical for robots to do welding for
low manufacturing run parts. Low manufacturing run parts tend to be made by
human welders now.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cyq28hoOQ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cyq28hoOQ4)

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Animats
Very nice. Getting the pairs of wooden pins into the holes for all three
cross-pieces of the chair is impressive. That's a tough planning and force-
feedback problem.

------
xixixao
Full video: [https://youtu.be/Jec2Z3CkBGM](https://youtu.be/Jec2Z3CkBGM)

Full assembly 8min 55sec.

~~~
sbierwagen
Looks like they're using the Robotiq 2-finger gripper:
[https://robotiq.com/products/2-finger-adaptive-robot-
gripper](https://robotiq.com/products/2-finger-adaptive-robot-gripper)

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Isamu
So Ikea should send you home with a Swedish assembly-bot carrying your boxes.

(I'm thinking of something like Bender with an accent, but hey that's just
me.)

~~~
ozim
Ok Bender with Swedish accent assembling my furniture. Best I can imagine my
apartment ending up in flames, worst my apartment ending up in black hole just
after Futurama jingle.

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mlboss
Can it read the assembly manual too ?

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TheOtherHobbes
Just wait until IKEA starts selling self-assembly robots.

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horsecaptin
I can't wait for em' to take care of my kids. "Hardest job in the whole
world". Come on, robots! What are you waiting for?

~~~
wjp3
We've had that for decades now: television.

~~~
rimliu
Or for eight years: iPad.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Or for forever: nannies / grandparents.

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InclinedPlane
IKEA assembly is a trivial task, the fact that it's perceived as otherwise is
more an indication of the functional illiteracy and lack of basic mechanical
knowledge in the population than anything else. Nevertheless, the fact that
IKEA furniture is insanely popular would tend to indicate that many do not
find assembly to be overly difficult.

~~~
bambax
Yes, assembling Ikea furniture is very easy, but memes are not really based on
reality. Maybe it's the opposite.

Mayonnaise is the most popular sauce _ever_ ; yet the meme is that it's
"disgusting".

Almost everybody has Ikea at home; yet the meme is that it's impossible to
assemble.

Maybe memes are trying to tell us something... but I'm not sure what.

~~~
smelendez
Assembling Ikea furniture is easy in the sense that most people can do it
eventually, but it's kind of tedious, easy to make an annoying mistake that
requires backtracking and often stressful. People elsewhere in the thread
mentioned assembling it with kids around, and often you're putting it together
at a hectic time because you've just moved or need the furniture ready and the
house clean before having guests, etc. Enough people have had these
experiences that the meme is popular.

I don't personally care for mayonnaise. I think the memes are popular
precisely because mayonnaise is so popular. A lot of the anti-mayo memes I've
seen complaining about mayonnaise are about finding it where you don't expect
it or ordering sandwiches without it and still getting it. There are fewer
memes ranting about less common ingredients like Buffalo sauce or hummus
because you don't have to go out of your way to avoid those.

~~~
ghaff
Yeah. It’s usually fairly straightforward and is pretty easy for small pieces.
Something like a large dresser though, while perhaps not being hard, can be
rather tedious to plow through.

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woodpanel
_> Robot Conquers One of the Hardest Human Tasks: Assembling Ikea Furniture_

Totally off-topic but keeps bugging me everytime I stumble upon it: The
decades old cliché that Ikea instructions are tough to understand and the
assembly will always fail (at first try).

Is this some anti-globalist urban myth?

Has anyone claiming this ever looked at the assembly instruction of furniture
of smaller companies? Every mid- to high-class designer furniture item I've
bought came with instructions that had terrible UX, that were over-detailed,
cramped onto one sheet of paper, had way too small print size to read, made it
difficult to differentiate screw sizes etc. virtually all of them left you at
one point in uncertainty how to interpret the next step, which could cause
destruction if done wrong. Some even came with outright wrong instructions.

Contrast that not only to the text-free Ikea-pictograms that work across the
globe, but also to the thought that went into optimizing the assembling so
that complicated "points of no return" are virtually absent.

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
Absolutely seconded.

People think that because the visualizations are relatively simple in their
shapes, then the design itself must have been simple. It's exceedingly
difficult to create instructions that work across language and cultural
barriers. It takes a tremendous amount of thought and effort, and IKEA is
almost certainly the best in the world and deserve recognition for that.

~~~
BurningFrog
Some call it the Thelonious Monk principle

"Simple ain't easy"

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kevindong
I personally enjoy putting together IKEA furniture. It's like a mildly easy
puzzle with an end result that you'll use every day. It's very satisfying for
me.

Admittedly, it's really easy for me to read/interpret the instructions. I
could see how assembling furniture would be a challenge if you're not an
engineer or something like that.

~~~
ivanhoe
It's much more enjoyable (and faster) when you use the proper power tools,
instead of those dreaded Allen keys that come with the package...

~~~
ghgfhgfhn
Second that, without an electric screwdriver with alan key attachments.
Without it packed furniture is a serious pita. With it you feel like an
unstoppable cyborg.

~~~
msumpter
We furnished our small satellite office in Seattle from IKEA, and putting the
supplied alan keys into a drill chuck saved our wrists from hours of torture.

------
bamboozled
Assembling IKEA furniture isn’t hard. People just perceive it to be hard
before they even try because it’s a meme.

~~~
Lionsion
> Assembling IKEA furniture isn’t hard. People just perceive it to be hard
> before they even try because it’s a meme.

People have different kinds of capabilities, and IKEA furniture assembly may
be easier for developer/engineer-types than others.

The components don't have labels and often require careful inspection to
choose the right one, based on illustrations that are also unlabeled and low-
resolution. Often times the pieces can be assembled incorrectly in a ways that
don't become evident until later, requiring disassembly to correct the
mistake. I can easily believe that people who have weaker visual-spacial
skills and/or are less detail-oriented would find the assembly hard and
frustrating.

Someone made a good analogy elsewhere: assembling Ikea furniture has a lot in
common with some kinds of puzzles. Some people _love_ puzzles, others
_tolerate_ them, and some _hate_ them. That's not "just a meme."

~~~
MichaelMoser123
They are a very successful company, how so if their products really have
usability problems of this kind?

~~~
cryptoz
They are very low-cost for some items that are traditionally high-cost. And
for all the people who have trouble doing assembly themselves, most (nearly
all) have a family member or friend more than willing to help. This means that
even though the same person buying and owning may not be building, the
popularity remains. It is also more than a meme at this point, is a specific
bonding time between friends and family alike.

Edit: I forgot to add, I think everywhere IKEA also offers an assembly
service, even same-day if you do it early enough. And with the assembly cost
added, I expect their furniture is _still_ cheaper than much of their
competition locally.

