Have you ever had trouble assembling IKEA furniture? Trying until you're convinced there must've been a screw that fell out or something and are the legs of this table backwards and look at that gelatinous blob-person on the instructions laughing at me?

The robot, used for research published in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, learns how to help with some guided instruction. If a person manually stiffens the robot's arm so the table's leg can be attached to the base, then the robot will know in repeat tries when to stiffen.