It also had the help of a green screen to view what it was working on. Granted, the Berkeley robot only had to deal with towels. Grasp, re-grasp, and attempt to determine the corners of the piece of laundry. This is a simplified view of how the Berkeley system worked. One method would be to grab something – anything out of the basket, shake it out, and go from there. Garments aren’t necessarily a solid color either. Pattern recognition is right out the window. Whites, colors, and prints all piled together. (PDF warning)Ī basket of clean laundry is an unstructured environment. Their final research paper details their results. While the results were promising, they were operating on a limited set of laundry – towels, and towels only. Way back in 2010, the pair and their team used a $400,000 USD PR2 robot from Willow Garage. The most promising work on laundry folding robots came from at Berkeley. Until I see proof that there isn’t a person back there folding the laundry, I’m going to call shenanigans on this one.
![challenge of the gobot challenge of the gobot](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jA9tl6xtZgg/maxresdefault.jpg)
The doors close, and a few minutes later the article of clothing magically appears folded. However, every demonstration I’ve seen to date consists of an unfolded piece of laundry being put in the machine. Seven Dreamers Laboratories from Japan has been advertising their Laundroid robot at trade shows, including CES. Even with modern process control technology, they still require human operators to hand-load each item. On the hacker side, the Foldimate 5000 is a novel approach to mechanical folding, though it can’t fold everything. These giant machines iron while they fold. Hotels, hospitals, and other industrial environments have machines that handle high volumes of sheets, towels, and other pieces of laundry. It would also be sure to place well in the 2016 Hackaday Prize.Ĭommercial folding machines exist. A project like this would take a person or group of people with skills in mechanics, electronics, machine vision, and software. The idea of this article is to show what has been done, and get people talking. It is this final step that cries out for a homemaking automaton to take this chore out of Everyman’s hands.Īs one can imagine, folding laundry is one of those tasks that is easy for humans, but hard for robots. Things have improved quite a bit since then! From the dryer we transfer our laundry to a basket, where it has to be folded. Many of the early machines were powered by gasoline engines, as electricity wasn’t common in rural farmhouses. Maytag has had home machines available for nearly 100 years. Hamilton Smith patented the rotary washing machine in 1858. Washers and dryers have become commonplace enough that we don’t think of them as robots.
![challenge of the gobot challenge of the gobot](https://iv1.lisimg.com/image/1759446/400full-challenge-of-the-gobots-screenshot.jpg)
Using machines to wash and dry laundry isn’t a new concept. One need look no further than one’s own laundry room. And while I don’t think we’re going to get to Rosie for a while, there are some simple challenges that can spur development in that direction. But we don’t have Rosie from the Jetsons. Sure, we’ve got Roomba, we’ve even got self-driving cars. General purpose home robots still have a long way to go. “This is the year of the general purpose home robot!” “2016 is going to be for robots like 1976 was for the home computer!” The problem with statements like those is the fact that we’ve been hearing them since the 1970’s.