Who wouldn't want a robot that could make your bed or do the laundry? Well, a team of Berkeley researchers has brought us one important step closer by, for the first time, enabling an autonomous robot to reliably fold piles of previously unseen towels.
Robots that can do things like assembling cars have been around for decades. The towel-folding robot, though, is doing something very new, according to the leaders of the Berkeley team, doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and Assistant Professor Pieter Abbeel of Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Robots like the car-assembly ones are designed to work in highly structured settings, which allows them to perform a wide variety of tasks with mind-boggling precision and repeatability ? but only in carefully controlled environments, Maitin-Shepard and Abbeel explain. Outside of such settings, their capabilities are much more limited.
Automation of household tasks like laundry folding is somewhat compelling in itself. But more significantly, according to Maitin-Shepard, the task involves one that's proved a challenge for robots: perceiving and manipulating "deformable objects" ? things that are flexible, not rigid, so their shape isn't predictable. A towel is deformable; a mug or a computer isn't.
While that is very advanced and clever....it took 30 seconds to fold a hand towel. So hmmm...spend a bunch of money to have something else take 4 times as long as me to do something, or just take 10 minutes and do it myself? I think I'll do it myself.
I'll take a robot to change my oil and spark plugs though.
Apr 06, 2010 @ 21:05:05
That made me laugh watching the robot try to figure out what it was looking at, lol!
