IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment | Hacker News Reader

IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment

clvrai.github.io

97 pointsTomte19 comments

I've read the page three times over and i still have no idea what exactly this is.

It's a (simulated) environment that allows you to develop AI technology. In this particular environment, you program a robot to assemble IKEA furniture.

With these simulated environments, do we have the processing power to run them at 1000x or 10,000x to speed up the learning? Or is it already processor intensive enough that it runs at nearly wall-clock time?

We can run at many multiples of real time. Physics simulation of solid wood blocks and metal screws is a mostly solved problem. I don't know about 1000x, but certainly 100x realtime.

> Physics simulation of solid wood blocks and metal screws is a mostly solved problem.

Not just solid wood. Frequently IKEA builds will involve either pressed+laminated particle-board (most of their cheap stuff) or drywall (when you e.g. mount a bookshelf to the wall for safety.) These materials both need to be simulated as a sort of "pressed powder", I would think, and tend to both spall/chip, and potentially jam your tooling with loosened powder. I would think a large part of the "optimization problem" would be avoiding designs that require repeatedly clearing toolways of dust.

That's probably out of the scope right now.

Looks to me like it is a simulation that allows reinforcement AI training to do "real world" tasks. I.e. a test bench for using computer vision, and AI to generate a set of assembly instructions.

This reminds me of SCP-3008 aka "Endless IKEA"

http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-3008

I want to play with it. I would actually pay for a VR game where i can, as realistically as possible, have to solve puzzles in the form of assemblying ikea-style furniture.

Or, you could just go to IKEA?

I don't think they'd be too happy if you just started unpacking and assembling random pieces of furniture in their store.

that sounds like an idea for a startup, lazy people can hire for free people that enjoys mounting IKEA furniture

Well, that was the gist of their partnership with TaskRabbit.

Not well received, but already exists: https://store.steampowered.com/app/357670/Home_Improvisation...

Lucky for you that exact game exists: https://thestorkburntdown.itch.io/home-improv

As an amateur carpenter, one of my favorite puzzles is repairing broken furniture. Most of my experience here is due to mistake I made building the furniture.

Annoyingly, these problems are very time consuming and involve a lot of uncertainty. If I could simulate repairing a broken joint I'd become a better carpenter and have fun with those problems.

I buy IKEA furniture for the fun challenge of assembling the pieces myself.

Very interesting!

That is an unexpected definition of "diversity"

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