Researchers in Singapore have built a robot using off-the-shelf components which can perfectly piece together an IKEA chair.

Using visual and tactile sensors, the robots quickly and reliably identified the correct parts placed in random positions, coordinated fast collision-free motions to construct the chair, and detected force changes as they gripped onto the chair pieces to verify that the pieces had slotted together correctly.

It took them between 8 and 20 minutes to build a chair.

The research was published in Science Robotics