Robots in Singapore have completed a task many humans dread — assembling flat-packed IKEA furniture.
Sifting through pages of instructions and a jumble of screws and bolts to build the low-cost Swedish furniture might soon be a thing of the past given advances in technology, researchers at the city-state’s Nanyang Technological University said.
The scientists spent three years programming the robot — made of arms, grippers, sensors and 3D cameras — which assembled the frame of an IKEA dining chair in about 20 minutes.
Photo: AFP
They say it might not be long before such robots can fully assemble a piece of furniture from a manual, verbal instruction or by just looking at an image of the finished item.
“We have achieved the low-level capability to teach the robot ‘how to do it’ and then in the next five to 10 years, high-level reasoning — the ‘what to do’ — could be done too,” assistant professor Quang-Cuong Pham said.
The team at NTU are looking to work with artificial intelligence experts to try and hone the process, Pham said.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s interesting to see an example of how robots could potentially contribute to our vision of creating a better everyday life for many people,” said Cindy Andersen, global business area manager of kitchen and dining at IKEA, in an interview with Britain’s Daily Mail. “We are very positive about embracing new technology.”
Singapore has been pushing businesses to invest in automation and robotics to boost productivity as it keeps a tight leash on cheap foreign labor. Some restaurants and hotels even use robots to deliver food to customers, and collect used plates and cutlery.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy