CAMBRIDGE, MA—Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a robot that uses touch and vision technology to play Jenga, a popular game that requires agility. The machine-learning approach could someday be applied to help robots assemble cellphones and other products that use small parts.
Jenga requires players to take turns carefully removing pieces from a tower of stacked blocks. The games use 54 rectangular wooden blocks that are stacked in 18 layers of three blocks each, with the blocks in each layer oriented perpendicular to the blocks below. The aim of the game is to carefully extract a block and place it at the top of the tower to build a new level, without toppling the entire structure.