Laundry-Folding Robot from UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley PR2 Robot Folds Laundry

In 2010, the Berkeley PR2 (unofficially named Brett, for "Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks") showed us that it could pick a towel out of a pile of clean laundry one by one and neatly fold and stack them, which was an impressive demo. Somewhat less impressive was the fact that the robot would take between 20 and 25 minutes to neatly fold one single towel, which, let's face it, isn't entirely practical. That time has now been cut down to under six minutes, with the potential for as little as two minutes per towel if they really crank the robot up.

The key to robots is in advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). A limiting factor in developing a useful and practical robot is that current robots can only do what their programming tells them. You can program a robot to fold a shirt, but if you throw in a shirt with buttons on the opposite side, the robot may not be able to fold the shirt. If you program a robot to bake a cake, there is little chance the robot can make lasagna without specific programming.

The PR2 doesn't rely on such discreet programming. Rather, it reduces the dependence on a complex vision system and instead relying on gravity and the properties of cloth. The PR2 now just picks up a towel wherever is convenient and then drags it across a folding table, knowing that as it does, the piece of the towel furthest away from the gripping point must necessarily be a corner.

What do you all think? Is this a big step forward in robotics technology or just another robot marginally better than the last?

Professor Pieter Abbeel is optimistic that by the time the PR2 Beta Program ends in 2012, they'll be able to do an entire laundry cycle from start to finish.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Robot
• AI
• Artificial
• intelligence
• Laundry

[bramcorleone]

I like this kind of robotics research, because it's practical and maybe I don't have to do any more household chores in ten, twenty years.. That would be so cool!