Ken Goldberg Quoted in Wired on Robot Manipulation
Goldberg was quoted in "A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown" by Matt Simon. The article discusses the research conducted by the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, which saw a robot putting together an Ikea chair.
From the article:
Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3-D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.
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Pretty impressive stuff, but the fact remains that the researchers have to do a good amount of hand-holding. "This is a nice result,” says UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, who works in robotic manipulation. “The big challenge is to replace such carefully engineered special purpose programming with new approaches that could learn from demonstrations and/or self-learn to perform tasks like this."
Read the rest of the Wired article here.