Watch: robots can now build IKEA flat-pack furniture so you don't have to

Robots can do wonderful things like open doors and execute backflips. But this latest skill could be the best yet.

A robot can now build Ikea furniture for you, specifically chairs.

Scientists at NTU Singapore, a technological university, have developed a robot that can autonomously assemble an Ikea chair in eight minutes and 55 seconds.

Before it began building the chair, it took 11 minutes and 21 seconds to independently plan the motion pathways and around three seconds to locate the chair’s parts.

The research has been published in Science Robotics journal.

How does the Ikea chair-building robot work?

The robot has been designed by assistant professor Pham Quang Cuong and his team at NTU’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

It has a 3D camera, which it uses to “see” the parts and two robotic arms equipped with grippers to pick up the options.

As well, it has force sensors on its wrists to determine how strongly the fingers are gripping the objects and pushing them into contact with each other.

The robot has been coded with algorithms from three different open-source libraries to equip it with the knowledge to build the chair.

Assistant professor Pham said the actual process the robot goes through to build the chair is more complex than it looks.

“The job of assembly, which may come naturally to humans, has to be broken down into different steps, such as identifying where the different chair parts are, the force required to grip the parts, and making sure the robotic arms move without colliding into each other.

“Through considerable engineering effort, we developed algorithms that will enable the robot to take the necessary steps to assemble the chair on its own."

After pulling off its assembly feat, the team is going to upgrade robot with artificial intelligence (AI) to give it more autonomy.

“We are looking to integrate more AI into this approach to make the robot more autonomous so it can learn the different steps of assembling a chair through human demonstration or by reading the instruction manual, or even from an image of the assembled product,” added Pham.

The robot can do more than assemble your Ikea furniture

It’s pretty cool that a robot can build a chair for you, though it probably isn’t good news for apps like TaskRabbit which were built to facilitate getting a handyman round to build your Ikea furniture for you.

But the NTU team believes the robot has a future outside tricks such as this. At the moment, they are working with different companies to apply this form of robotic manipulation to a range of industries.

For instance, they’re looking at how the robot could do glass bonding in the automotive industry or drill holes in metal components for the aircraft manufacturing industry.

I for one, am ready for our furniture-assembling robot overlords.