PR2 Does The Impossible, Folds Towels
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 31 of March , 2010 at 12:21 am
We cover a lot of robots around here, and to be fair, not every one of them makes you think “yeah, I could totally use one of those around the house!” Well, I could totally use a PR2 around my house now that it can autonomously fold stuff. Not sure how I’d get it up the stairs, but anyway…
So far, UC Berkeley’s Pieter Abbeel has only taught his PR2 to fold towels and other rectangles, but the important thing is that the PR2 is entirely unfamiliar with the things that it has to fold. Just toss a pile of towels of various sizes on the table, and PR2 will pick up each item, inspect it, and figure out how it should be folded. The folding routine even ends with an adorable little pat ‘n smooth. You have to remember, too, that even though PR2 is quite an impressive robot, the capabilities are mostly in the software:
“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.”
50/50 on towel folding? Yeah, that would definitely be an upgrade in my house.
[ UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab ] VIA [ Willow Garage @ Twitter ]
Comments (12)
Category: Research
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Comment by kwc
Made Wednesday, 31 of March , 2010 at 9:26 am
A lot of the credit goes to Jeremy Maitin-Shepard. He spent many a late night at WG making this happen.
Comment by seabird
Made Wednesday, 31 of March , 2010 at 10:47 am
this guy is soooooo cute x_x if only that were realtime and not 50x!!
Comment by seabird
Made Wednesday, 31 of March , 2010 at 10:47 am
wait… 50x? that can’t be right… so what is it?
Comment by whiskers
Made Wednesday, 31 of March , 2010 at 12:38 pm
That does look sped up, nonetheless, very impressive, starting with the detection of towel corners, up through flattening folding towels, and not making towel piles too tall!
Comment by baker
Made Wednesday, 31 of March , 2010 at 5:41 pm
I think it was sorting the towels based on size, not making another pile because the first was too big.
Comment by geo
Made Friday, 2 of April , 2010 at 7:46 am
Very nice but a little bit slow. Hope I will have got a faster one in 10 years :)
Comment by Michael
Made Saturday, 3 of April , 2010 at 8:01 pm
Wow, that is insanely impressive. Slow or not. I figure the first few electronic computer additions probably took just a bit longer than they do today. :) Figure what will be possible computationally in 10 yrs and we’ll probably have to play the film in slow motion to see anything but a blur. :)
Comment by alphachapmtl
Made Thursday, 8 of April , 2010 at 11:59 am
Amazing, but much much too slow to be useful.
Comment by Amanda Wyles
Made Sunday, 27 of March , 2011 at 3:08 am
Impressive albeit a little slow. Is this really progress or is the human race just becoming really lazy.
Comment by talker
Made Tuesday, 12 of July , 2011 at 12:07 am
What a moronic waste of talent. If you really wanted to automate the laundry process, you’d start by redesigning the washer and dryer, not designing a robot to mimic a human. It would be far cheaper and quicker to do.
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Made Friday, 11 of November , 2011 at 9:17 am
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Comment by kitchen lancaster
Made Monday, 21 of November , 2011 at 11:07 pm
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