Scientists have finally built a useful robot if you use a lot of towels. This robot can fold towels placed randomly on a surface and stack them neatly in a desired location. The significance of this is that it is hard for the robots computer brain to figure out what the towel is since it is floppy, has a fuzzy texture and come in all different colors. It may be easy for you and me to do, but our brains are a little more complex than even a super advanced robot. So scientist at Cal State Berkeley wrote an algorithm, to computer program, that allows the robots to figure out how to fold the towels.
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 finally stacks the folded towel in a target location. The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enables for the first 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. Read More
One thing to note before you go put a down payment on a towel folding robot is that the above video plays ar 50X it’s actual speed. So that means that at 2 minutes final time, it actually tool that robot 100 minutes to fold 5 towels. If you dumped al your towels in front of this robot, say you had 20 for your entire household, in the morning, it would be done almost 7 hours later. No clue how long it would take for it to fold a fitted sheet…
-Mike
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