You’ve decided you want some new furniture, now rather than spending hours trawling through catalogues looking for the right table, what if you could design it on your computer and then have a robot craft it in your back garden?
This might not be as futuristic as it sounds as researchers from MIT have created AutoSaw, a robotic system that can quite literally craft furniture from scratch.
The system lets you design the furniture using a simple CAD-based program on your laptop and even helps you through the process if you’ve never used it before.
Once you have your finished design the software then relays the exact measurements and instructions to AutoSaw and all you have to do is provide the raw materials.
It’ll cut pieces to shape, drill the necessary holes and even move them around the workshop for you.
Once it’s done you’re left with a piece of perfectly cut furniture ready to be put together. Think Ikea just without actually having to go to Ikea and carry the entire thing home.
Why do we now have a furniture-building robot? Well for precisely that reason, to effectively democratise something that traditionally has been left to those with years of training.
Of course it’s not looking to replace those finely crafted or luxury pieces of furniture, rather it could be something to get if you’re particularly creative and want to design and build your own furniture.