Put That Laundry Basket Down; There’s a Robot That Folds

Editor’s Disclosure: The following was released last spring but we decided that it was well worth the repeat about The New York Times Science article, Race to Build a Robot More Like Us.

Who wouldn’t want a robot that could make your bed or do the laundry? Well, a team of Berkeley researchers has brought us one important step closer by enabling an autonomous robot to reliably fold piles of previously unseen towels.

Robots that can do things like assembling cars have been around for decades. The towel-folding robot, though, is doing something very new, according to the leaders of the Berkeley team, doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and Assistant Professor Pieter Abbeel of Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Robots like the car-assembly ones are designed to work in highly structured settings, which allows them to perform a wide variety of tasks with mind-boggling precision and repeatability — but only in carefully controlled environments, Maitin-Shepard and Abbeel explain. Outside of such settings, their capabilities are much more limited.

Automation of household tasks like laundry folding is somewhat compelling in itself. But more significantly, according to Maitin-Shepard, the task involves one that’s proved a challenge for robots: perceiving and manipulating “deformable objects” – things that are flexible, not rigid, so their shape isn’t predictable. A towel is deformable; a mug or a computer isn’t.

A video — posted on this page — tells the story best. It shows a robot built by the Menlo Park robotics company Willow Garage and running an algorithm developed by the Berkeley team, faced with a heap of towels it’s never “seen” before. The towels are of different sizes, colors and materials.

The robot picks one up and turns it slowly, first with one arm and then with the other. It uses a pair of high-resolution cameras to scan the towel to estimate its shape. Once it finds two adjacent corners, it can start folding. On a flat surface, it completes the folds — smoothing the towel after each fold, and making a neat stack.