Berkeley Gets Willow Garage Robot To Fold Towels

kkleiner writes "Researchers at UC Berkeley used Willow Garage's PR2 robot to fold towels. The UCB programming used some innovative visual scanning techniques, allowing the PR2 to pick up a towel, find its corners, and fold it on a table perfectly. According to the paper presented at the 2010 ICRA (PDF), the robot successfully completed 50 out of 50 attempts to fold a single towel, and also folded 5 out of 5 towels when they were presented in a group. Is watching a robot do laundry really that exciting? Hell yes — wait until you see the video! UC Berkeley used a Willow Garage robot to develop their own sophisticated robotics program. That validates the whole premise of the PR2 — faster development by letting researchers use a common platform. Score one for open source robotics!"

Re:Hotels

[Red Flayer]

I'm sure there are some hoteliers that will be excited about reducing their staffing for for washing and folding all the towels and sheets they go through.

Cost/efficiency? Probably cheaper to have poor immigrant labor continue to do it -- and that's for hotels that don't outsource linens. FYI, linens are already robotically pressed and folded in the big laundry service facilities.

Hospitals likely would love this too, since it wouldn't show up sick and help spread diseases on clean linens.

Hospital linens are, to my knowledge, pressed and folded in a sterile environment by robots, then packaged to maintain sterility before delivery back to the hospital. I know this is true for my two local hospitals, not sure about others.

The video seems impressive...

[mister_playboy]

The video seems impressive until you realize it has been sped up 50 times actual speed... it took more than an hour and a half to fold 5 towels!

Cool, but very far from anything practical.

Re:Towels are Lame!

[smellsofbikes]

I've done it. I also dispute the claim that she's the first person in history to have ever done it, because this was a well-known out-of-the-box solution on the CalTech campus in the late 1960's.

The smug guy says "I know you can't fold a piece of paper more than 7 times."

You say "oh yeah? any piece of paper? How about $20 says I can do it 9 times?"

Then you go get a roll of toilet paper, and you roll it out. You can find rolls of industrial-grade toilet paper: you know, the itchy horrible stuff, that are 2000 feet long, and 0.004" thick. Then you start folding in half. It takes a lot of walking, but you end up with something a couple feet long and a couple inches thick at 9 folds. If you get adding machine paper, or even better punch tape from old computers, which is both longer and thinner (some tapes) you can do better yet.

Re:Eerily Creepy

[xianthax]

Boston Dynamics work is far creepier, check out these videos, especially the first one:

http://www.youtube.com/user/bostondynamics?blend=3&ob=4#p/a/f/0/W1czBcnX1Ww [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/user/bostondynamics?blend=3&ob=4#p/a/u/2/A3vCUFf_-uo [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/user/bostondynamics?blend=3&ob=4#p/a/u/0/67CUudkjEG4 [youtube.com]

Re:open source...fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the visual recognition processing in the folding towel demonstration is far more impressive than the basic recognition needed in the linked videos you provided (and the first video didn't need any visual recognition).