Chris Higgins
Welcome Our New Towel-Folding Robot Overlords
by Chris Higgins - April 2, 2010 - 2:27 PM

UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard has developed a robot capable of folding towels. Watch in the video below as the robot inspects, folds, and stacks the towels. (Note that the video is running at 50 times real speed. This robot ain’t snappy, but he works long hours.) To be clear, the robot itself is a general-purpose machine, but Maitin-Shepard et al wrote the software for folding towels.

From the research paper:

We proposed a cloth grasp point detection algorithm which has been shown to have very high precision and a very reasonable rate of recall while being highly robust to variation in material, size, and appearance due to relying only on geometric cues. The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enabled 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. Although our complete folding procedure was specialized to towels, the proposed algorithm could likely be useful for detecting grasp points on many types of clothing.

Read more about the robot in Maitin-Shepard et al’s paper Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding (PDF link).

(Via BoingBoing.)

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Comments (10)

  1. Why am I so scared of it? I used to think Roombas were awesome but something is just creepy about it, it reminds me of the characters in polar express.

    posted by Dan on 4-2-2010 at 2:33 pm

  2. That’ the Uncanny Valley in effect, I think. Something about the fluidity of the robot’s arm movement freaks me out. More on the UV:

    http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/6314

    posted by Chris Higgins on 4-2-2010 at 2:41 pm

  3. Yep creepy, Next step Terminator robots….As soon as skynet is online we’re all in trouble.

    recaptcha: C.I.A. extort

    posted by hockeyzombie on 4-2-2010 at 2:53 pm

  4. I just think it’s remarkable how the robot takes so long to recognize the shape of the towel. Meanwhile we recognize the shape immediately.

    posted by Patrick on 4-2-2010 at 3:05 pm

  5. Why does it look like stop action photography?

    posted by Rebecca on 4-2-2010 at 3:19 pm

  6. Rebecca – maybe because it’s sped up so much? I imagine they’d have to skip frames to do that, which might account for the weirdness.

    posted by Chris Higgins on 4-2-2010 at 3:24 pm

  7. Hmm, although this may be a labor saver, it isn’t a space saver by any means. I wonder to what extent it inspects the towels for cleanliness though and what it does with those that don’t pass, so to speak. for instance is it only visual, and how does it base it, difference in color? Not a bad idea.

    posted by Susan on 4-2-2010 at 9:40 pm

  8. I was disapointed thinking this was going to be making animal shapes like you would get on a cruise ship or a theme park hotel.

    posted by CHRIS on 4-3-2010 at 8:55 am

  9. I am so excited about the possibilities! It would be amazing if I never had to fold clothes again!

    posted by KerriD on 4-3-2010 at 6:22 pm

  10. A towel folding robot is impressive. But I think a more impressive accomplishment would be to design and program a robot who finds missing socks!

    posted by nvrijn on 4-5-2010 at 5:01 am

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