A Skill-Based Programming System for Robotic Furniture Assembly

Ready-to-assemble furniture is a popular trend for today’s furniture companies such as IKEA due to its relative lower price and easier delivery to customers than assembled furniture. However, assembling furniture from an instruction manual by customers themselves is a tedious task. With the advance in robotics in recent years, having a robot to perform the furniture assembly is a viable idea but the cost of robotic furniture assembly is a barrier, as the overhead of using artificial intelligence techniques such as deep learning can be prohibitive. This paper presents a robotic system with a library of assembly skills that are acquired by machine learning and can be reused for different furniture sets. By applying these skills, the robot can be programmed to automatically perform the assembly task. We describe how to design a robotic task programming system that supports composition of skills and how to specify a complex assembly task to be completed by the robot with its skill set.