Advanced Visual Algorithm Powers Laundry Folding Robot

The PR2 bot from the University of California-Berkeley employs a number of visual sensors to detect geometric contrast between objects and backgrounds. Combining this with algorithms for human-like interaction with objects, the robot is able to fold rectangular towels both individually and from piles without any prior knowledge of what items it will be handling. Professor Pieter Abbeel of the University of California-Berkeley Personal Robotics department comments below:

The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enables 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.

Watch a video demonstration below:

PopSci: “Adorable Laundry-Folding Robot Gives Your Towels Fastidious Attention”