How to fold towels robot

Robot for the first time can be arbitrarily stacked together to classify different size towels, folding and stacking processing. Before that, the robot can only be known size, and placed the towel towards a specific sort out.

While it is good at handling robots, such as cups, tools and other objects have a fixed shape, but they can not reliably handle some of the fabric, and do not have a fixed shape of the strange object. Have this capability will eventually allow the robot to participate in the work of the laundry, or other soft object-related tasks.

Robot picked up a towel from the towel after the heap, use two fingers rotating mechanical clamp towel, while high-resolution cameras from various angles through the observation of towels. University of California, Berkeley researchers developed an algorithm to make the robot can estimate the curvature of the fabric to distinguish the edges and creases towel (larger than the curvature of the edge of the crease in the curvature). By observing the intersection of two edges, the robot can determine the towel of the iceberg. Robots will take this corner, and then identify and seize another nearby corner. Then, the robot will start towel, check towel in the shape before folding. To prevent the robot "deceived", the researchers designed a "self-correcting" process, if the robot detects an error, it will try to correct the error, when necessary, the robot will start a new round of liberalization of the work of a towel. Robot 50 consecutive experiments were successful.

At present, the robot takes to fold a towel for about 20 minutes, researchers are adjusting algorithm to speed up the process. They also plan to write a new algorithm for robot folding shirts and other items, and let the robots can learn by observing human demonstrations of new items stacked.