Even building LEGO sets is being run by machines now

Humans building LEGO sets using instructions might be a thing of the past, at least if this machine has anything to say about it.

Ruocheng Wang, Yunzhi Zhang, Jiayuan Mao,  Chin-Yi Cheng and Jiajun Wu of Stanford University, MIT CSAIL and the Autodesk AI Lab as shared by Ben Houston on Twitter, have created a machine that can interpret and build LEGO sets just by looking at the step-by-step instructions that we use.

In short, this program can look at a set of instructions such as the guitar used in the example video and determine which shape and colour brick needs to be placed next, move it into position according to the manual and move on to the next step. This includes smaller builds that will be attached to the main assembly.

Automatically "Translating a Visual LEGO Manual to a Machine-Executable Plan". So cool. Reads the lego manual an assembles the lego pieces. https://t.co/RZHOXlm67O pic.twitter.com/Z2AcKbX1nR

— Ben Houston (@BenHouston3D) July 27, 2022

The example featured in the project is presented digitally, though it seems plausible that this program could be applied to a physical machine to take it to the next step.

While this is an impressive project, we can’t imagine that building LEGO sets will be its main application since putting together the bricks is an essential part of the LEGO set experience.

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