A robot that can create simple objects from reusable building blocks based on spoken commands could one day be used to quickly build furniture.
Artificial intelligence programs can create 3D digital models of objects from text or voice commands, but making these into real objects can be difficult. Using a 3D printer is one route, but the resulting object will be limited by the size of the printer and won鈥檛 often be easily recyclable.
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Now, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed a robot that can assemble building blocks called voxels to build an object with almost any shape you ask it for.
鈥淵ou can get furniture-scale objects really fast in a very sustainable way, because you can reuse these modular components and ask a robot to reassemble them into different large-scale objects,鈥� says Kyaw.
The system first takes a person鈥檚 spoken request, transcribes it to text and then converts it into a 3D model using an AI trained on a vast database of pictures from the internet. A computer-aided design program then converts this model into a system of voxel coordinates, which can be assembled by a robotic arm.
Kyaw and his team used the robot to build several objects, including a chair and a shelf, as well as less functional designs, such as a dog shape or the letter T. They didn鈥檛 test the objects for their structural properties, but Kyaw says they hope to make this a feature in future designs.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a question about where the limits are of this approach by itself, and to what extent you have to combine it with other approaches from engineering or AI,鈥� says at the University of Sheffield, UK. 鈥淗ow much can you learn from collections of images and descriptions of chairs on the internet?鈥�
While the current method only uses one kind of voxel building block, it would be interesting to see if the objects鈥� mechanical properties could be improved by using voxels made from different materials, such as metal and wood, says Gross. However, this would require a more complex AI model to work out where to place each block, he says.
arXiv
