A flat-pack furniture kit whose parts are fitted with cheap microprocessors that monitor what you are doing during assembly has been developed in Switzerland. The kit will warn you if you are doing something wrong or dangerous.
Stavros Antifakos and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have found 44 different paths that someone working without the instructions can take to fit the pieces of an IKEA wardrobe together. But only eight of these result in a safe construction. Other paths lead to something that looks stable, but is not, or come to a dead end.
While IKEA鈥檚 instruction sheets lead to a safely constructed unit, Antifakos thinks that the order in which parts should be assembled often seems arbitrary to the buyer. 鈥淧eople find this annoying so they don鈥檛 follow them,鈥� he says. He will describe his team鈥檚 alternative approach later in September at a conference in Sweden.
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The team have fixed movement and pressure sensors to the six pieces that make up the sides of an IKEA wardrobe. The sensors feed data into a battery-powered microchip built into one of the pieces.
This works out where all the pieces are in relation to each other and generates instructions, tips and warnings that appear on a separate computer screen, which is connected over a wireless link.
Screwdriver sensors
Eventually, the team hope to build small, cheap LED-based displays into the parts. So for instance, a steady light could tell you which piece to fit next, or a flashing light could warn you that you are trying to force-fit the wrong one.
To make sure the 鈥渃lever鈥� flat-pack does not waste its batteries on the shop shelves, the sensors, microchips and LEDs will be light-activated, so there is no power drain until the pieces are out of the box.
And the technology is not stopping at the flat-pack. Antifakos has also fitted screwdrivers with sensors so the system knows if screws are being over-tightened, for instance.
The team hopes that self-assembly items like tents could also one day come with these embedded assembly aids.