Laundry Folding Record

Addressing common tasks.

Robot Laundry Folding Speed Record Broken

Ars Technica, Benj Edwards, October 19, 2022

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have achieved a new robot laundry-folding speed record with the SpeedFolding system. SpeedFolding combines machine vision, the BiManual Manipulation Network (BiMaMa-Net), and two industrial robot arms to fold 30 to 40 randomly positioned garments per hour; the researchers said the previous record was three to six folds per hour. The BiMaMa-Net neural network analyzed 4,300 human and machine-assisted examples to learn to fold clothing. The system uses an overhead camera to study the garment's initial state, and to calculate where to grasp it. The SpeedFolding robot can fold clothes from a random initial position in less than two minutes on average at a 93% success rate, as well as generalize to clothes of differing material, shape, or color than those it trained with.  .. '