When Jeffrey Lipton was first learning carpentry, the master carpenter who was training him had cut off both his thumbs–twice. His uncle had already lost part of a finger. In college, a classmate split his hand in half. The more Lipton was around power saws growing up, the more he recognized that these injuries were a cost of the craft–sometimes avoidable, perhaps, but not completely eliminable.
Until now, perhaps. Today Lipton is a researcher at MIT, and he has teamed up with his colleagues Adriana Schulz and Daniela Rus to build a robotic sawing system called AutoSaw that could not just change the way carpenters build projects in factories or on construction sites, but one day allow any Home Depot weekend warrior to build the custom cabinets of their dreams without risking life and limb.
“The digital revolution has affected a lot of industries. But for the most part, the biggest revolution in carpentry in the last few decades was the lithium-ion battery,” Lipton says. “It made my tools a lot lighter! But carpentry is waiting for the computing revolution.”
Lipton is talking about tedious task automation. Could a construction worker just hand a pile of 2x4s to a robot and say, “Go,” like an accountant does taxes in an Excel spreadsheet? Could a homeowner create detailed 3D furniture models as easily as their teenage daughter plays around with Instagram filters?