The Difficulty of Creating a Laundry-folding Robot

"It might be a while before you can buy a 'Roomba for laundry'," jokes Slashdot reader Tony Isaac, pointing out that "while robots have been developed that can fold specific types of laundry, there's still not a good robot that can do the job quickly, or for all types." But NPR reports laundry-folding robots are getting closer:As NPR has reported, machines need clear rules in order to function, and it's hard for them to figure out what exactly is going on in those messy piles That's not to say that it's completely impossible. University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel spent years teaching a robot how to fold a towel, eventually cutting that process down from 20 minutes to a whopping minute and a half. And Silicon Valley-based company FoldiMate raised hopes and eyebrows when it showed off a prototype of its eponymous laundry-folding robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2019. It said the machine could fold some 25 pieces of laundry - except for small items like socks and large items like sheets - in under five minutes, with an estimated price tag of $980. It's unclear what happened to that company - its website is down and it hasn't tweeted since April 2020. Its sole competitor, a Japanese company with an AI-powered prototype, filed for bankruptcy. In sum, most robots have not generally been equipped for the task. But an international group of researchers say their new method could change that - or at least speed up the process. Researchers are calling the new method, SpeedFolding. It's a "reliable and efficient bimanual system" - meaning it involves two hands - that's able to smooth and fold a crumpled garment in record speed (for robots, that is). SpeedFolding can fold 30 to 40 strewn-about garments per hour, compared to previous models that averaged three to six garments in that same time span, according to researchers. They say their robot can fold items in under two minutes, with a success rate of 93%. "Real-world experiments show that the system is able to generalize to unseen garments of different color, shape, and stiffness," they add. According to the article, the team will be presenting their paper at a robotics conference in Kyoto this month, and they've also posted a one-minute video on YouTube. (Their solution involves both an overhead camera and a novel neural network called BiManual Manipulation Network that "studied 4,300 human and machine-assisted actions in order to learn how to smooth and fold garments from a random configuration." "While researchers describe SpeedFolding as a significant improvement, it's not likely to hit the market anytime soon," notes NPR. "For one, Ars Technica tracked down a robot similar to the one they used and found that it retails for $58,000."

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