Robot folds laundry

UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, working with Prof. Pieter Abbeel, has developed software that enables a robot to fold towels. From the abstract to their scientific paper:

The robot begins by picking up a randomly dropped towel from a table, goes through a sequence of vision-based re-grasps and manipulations-- partially in the air, partially on the table--and ï¬nally stacks the folded towel in a target location. The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enables for the ï¬rst time a robot with general purpose manipulators to reliably and fully-autonomously fold previously unseen towels, demonstrating success on all 50 out of 50 single-towel trials as well as on a pile of 5 towels.

"Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding" (Thanks, Ken Goldberg!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Anonymous

Nice LEOPARD print towel…loser.
- Anonymous
  
  The leopard print was probably used to test the ability to deal with complex patterns without any problems.
Anonymous

What happens when you put a shirt in the pile?
pragmatist

I love how the time-lapse footage makes its final folding actions look downright dainty!
- arkizzle / Moderator
  
  pragmatist,
  
  Exactly!
Chupacabara

Klaatu Barada Nickers!
- bpratt
  
  #16 FTW!
  
  Not a 4/1 gag, though. Per the team’s paper the average total duration per towel was 1478 seconds (about 25 minutes) so you can see why they went the timelapse video route.
donotclickjim

Impressive, even if it does take it forever. Just think, if they can improve the speed and get the costs down this could also end the fast food jobs as well as any other low skill labor job. Give it 10-20 years and these will dominate the current low wage jobs.
SamSam

It’s Rosie!

It’s amazing how anthropomorphic she gets after a minute or so, at least to me. The quizzical way she holds up a new towel — now what the hell am I going to do with this one? Is this really a towel? How about on the back? — is priceless.
- Ignatz
  
  Rosie? Naaah, it’s Noo-noo from the Teletubbies!
- omems
  
  I see that also. If it were folding undies it would seem a bit too much scrutiny. Just like mom used to do…
kpkpkp

Bender’s Mom?
http://blogs.eveningsun.com/troublebrewing/bender.jpg
apoxia

Shit, Skynet’s just around the corner!
randalll

If they figured out how to make it pair up socks and hang up dress shirts I would drop $500 on this immediately. I haaaate doing laundry.
GraemeM

Brilliant! Now give it a pair of trousers, at tie and a bra, in that order, and sent it around here on a Sunday. PS, the bra is not mine.
deckard68

How many towels did it take to learn the table trick, though? Was colliding the towel with the table to make a fold part of the process from the start or did it learn it?
dculberson

I couldn’t help myself:

http://www.gatetek.com/images/robotlupe.jpg
Phikus

That’s nothing. I hear Ben folds five!
kasinator79

For some reason I found this very cute.
Fred H

Can we program it to gossip in cockney as well? I always wanted a Victorian-era scullery maid.
Fred H

Also, the video needs Yakkity-Sax.
Anonymous

He(?) does it quicker than me!
Anonymous

Now THAT is pretty impressive. Considering that my wife can’t fold towels.

Although I bet it is pretty tedious to watch at real-time speed (it looks sped up.)
pstarr

love it, but it definitely needs yakity sax-ing.
Anonymous

Watching a robot do such a familiar task so painstakingly makes me realise how amazing human beings are.
Anonymous

April fools! I love how the drapes move in the back ground as if they were stop animated. Amazing technology, that robot. It must run on pneumatics.
- Anonymous
  
  Nope, it runs on electrict motors
danwarning

I guess that’s a good thing. It would give my wife more time making sandwiches and getting beer for me.
rationalist

Sudo fold me a towel.
Anonymous

Sorry! Still cannot distinguish between large boxer shorts and small towels.

Useless! Useless!
dculberson

April Fools? Really?

The video was posted March 17th.
Anonymous

I’m still not convinced that this is not just a bad stop motion video.
tetron

This is awesome.

Definitely not April fools prank. The header notes it was presented at IRCA 2010 which is a major IEEE robotics conference. The title notes the video is spend up 50 (!) times so it is actually taking the better part an hour to do it — I wonder what the bottleneck to doing it faster is?
Jack

I guess this is the “Beyond” of “Bed, Bath & Beyond.”
Anonymous

If I bought my wife a folding robot, my wife would still complain that it wasn’t folding them CORRECTLY! (thirds first, then halfs)

That’s why I let HER fold towels in our house.
Anonymous

April fools!
Clue, it’s stop motion photo.
Hilarious watching the robot decide how to fold it.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Haven’t folding machines been used industrially for decades?
  - Phikus
    
    Well, there used to be, but they folded.
- Anonymous
  
  Nope, The video was uploaded to youtube on st. paddy’s day!
arkizzle / Moderator

Beautiful! :)

It’s like an Aardman stopframe animation. The quizzical, house-proud robot :)
Anonymous

It is all good until you realize that he is planning on picking you up by the neck and folding your spleen in half.
cymk

I for one welcome our towel folding over lords. Even if it takes them 20 minutes to fold a single towel.
Yamara

Yes, the baby had on a clean diaper before I sent the laundry bot off to tidy the nursery. Why do you ask?
dagfooyo

Wow, robots doing household tasks! The future of the 1950s is finally coming true!
- Haakon IV
  
  Yes, if you have a $1.2 million NSF grant for your laundry needs.
Anonymous

Sure they’re happy to fold towels now, but give them 50-60 years and they’ll want equal rights, voting privileges, birth control, pants, shoes, etc.
Heartfruit

Call me when it can do fitted sheets in less the 30 min and we might have a winner.
Anne K.

It’s probably a little sad how much I would probably pay for a robot to fold my laundry.
Anonymous

(insert obligatory skynet joke here)
Anonymous

I’m really tickled by the distinction of “previously unseen towels.”