Putting together flat-pack furniture can be arduous and frustrating. So why not let robots do it instead? A pair of robot arms can now assemble an IKEA chair in just a few minutes, and without arguing too. The setup consists of two industrial robot arms with grippers and force sensors, all watched over by a 3D camera. To start things off, parts of an IKEA STEFAN chair are jumbled up and dumped in front of the arms.

Do you even lift, bro-bot? A team of Japanese engineers has designed robots that can perform push-ups, do crunches, stretch and even sweat while doing so. The robots Kengoro and Kenshiro, described in the journal Science Robotics, can perform remarkably human-like movements -- and could serve as a model to help scientists design better crash dummies and prosthetic limbs and to better understand the moving human body's mysterious inner workings. Researchers have been developing humanoid robots for years, each becoming more advanced than the last -- but there are still a number of kinks to work out, the study authors wrote. "A limitation of conventional humanoids is that they have been designed on the basis of the theories of conventional engineering, mechanics, electronics and informatics," the study authors pointed out.