Researchers in Singapore say they've built a robot that was able to put together a chair from IKEA in about 20 minutes.

Singaporean scientists have asked the question "Can robots assemble an IKEA chair?" and come back with enough of a "Yes" that The Register feels it time to call for robots to take this job away from humans. Take this job away from us! The boffins behind this breakthrough, assistant professor Pham Quang Cuong and a team of students, all of Nanyang Technological University, were cognizant of previous attempts at unpacking flat-pack kit that had used bespoke kit. So they instead used off-the-shelf robots and open-source code like the Point cloud library and gave them the job of assembling a "STEFAN" chair. As the video below shows, the bots clearly know Bob The Builder's couplet: "Can we build it?

When it comes to robots stealing our jobs, there's one task that plenty of people would be happy to relinquish: assembling flat-pack furniture. The day we can handball that job off is a step closer. In Science Robotics today, a trio of roboticists from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore unveiled a semi-autonomous pair of robotic arms that can put together the frame of an IKEA chair. Made from off-the-shelf gear, their invention can look at chair parts scattered around, grasp and lift the right bit, carefully insert wooden pins in pre-drilled holes and slot the pieces together. And while the robot's repertoire of furniture-building skills is limited -- it can't yet screw in metal screws, for instance -- the technology could soon be ready for jobs that require human-like dexterity, such as electronics and aircraft manufacturing.

Sifting through pages of instructions and a jumble of screws and bolts to build the low-cost Swedish furniture may soon be a thing of the past given advances in technology, say researchers at the city-state's Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

Those who fear the rise of the machines, look away now. In a laboratory in Singapore two robots have mastered a task that roundly defeats humans every weekend: they have successfully assembled an Ikea chair. Engineers at Nanyang Technological University used a 3D camera and two industrial robot arms fitted with grippers and force sensors to take on the challenge of building an £18 "Stefan" chair from the furniture company. Working together, the robots completed the job in 20 minutes and 19 seconds after having the parts placed in front of them. More than half of the time was spent planning moves, with the execution taking nine minutes in total.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos tours the facility at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Jan. 29, 2018. Amazon's Jeff Bezos said it counts more than 100 million paying members for Amazon Prime, the delivery and content business that's at the heart of its sales growth. The CEO and founder, in his annual letter to shareholders, said last year more members joined Prime than in any previous year. Prime subscribers spend a lot more on Amazon -- $1,300 per year on average -- compared to about $700 for non-Prime members, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up," said Bezos. We didn't ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's'wow' quickly becomes today's'ordinary'. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something's in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well.

What happens when you combine the Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Edge Computing? Before I tell you, let's review each one and discuss what AWS has to offer. Internet of Things (IoT) – Devices that connect the physical world and the digital one. The devices, often equipped with one or more types of sensors, can be found in factories, vehicles, mines, fields, homes, and so forth. Important AWS services include AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT Device Management, and Amazon FreeRTOS, along with others that you can find on the AWS IoT page.

It is the cause of countless marital rows over mislaid allen keys and baffling instructions. But while trying to build Ikea furniture can ruin a weekend for many couples, the robots at least have got it sussed. Robots can build an Ikea chair in under nine minutes, mechanical engineers have discovered, after being programmed to fit the parts together perfectly. People, according to Ikea, take 10 to 15 minutes on average to build the same item of furniture. Robots can build an Ikea chair in under nine minutes, mechanical engineers have discovered, after being programmed to fit the parts together perfectly.

Apparently, one of the standards by which we should be measuring the progress of useful robotic manipulation is through the assembly of Ikea furniture. With its minimalistic and affordable Baltoscandian design coupled with questionably creditable promises of effortless assembly, Ikea has managed to convince generations of inexperienced and desperate young adults (myself included) that we can pretend to be grownups by buying and putting together our own furniture. It's never as easy as that infuritatingly calm little Ikea manual dude makes it look, though, and in terms of things we wish robots would solve, Ikea furniture assembly has ended up way higher on the priority list than maybe it should be. We've seen a variety of robotic systems tackle Ikea in the past, but today in Science Robotics is (perhaps for the first time) a mostly off-the-shelf system of a few arms and basic sensors that can put together the frame of a Stefan chair kit autonomously(ish) and from scratch. This research comes from the Control Robotics Intelligence (CRI) group at NTU in Singapore, and they've been working on the whole Ikea chair assembly thing for a while.

This is a great book, and I'd say it is even great for those that are not familiar with python (you just obviously won't be able to run the code). For anyone with some basic understanding of linear algebra/statistics, the authors are able to present to you all the important (and sometimes subtle but significant) details, without the usage of equations, and more importantly, how they all relate to one another. All the concepts mentioned here are heavily backed with well thought of and well presented figures, in such a way that again I'd suggest you don't even need python to understand. If you do know python, loading the data sets and reproducing the figures is just a few lines of easy to understand code away (with the exception of the mglearn library includes which does some "plotting magic" for you. However, I believe each of them were appropriate.