Wanna see something funny? Watch the video below to see a robot folding a towel.
Surprisingly, folding a towel is a whole lot harder than it might sound. Robots are good at performing the exact same task endlessly and precisely, but that presumes a very structured setting, with everything in exactly the same place each time through.
A pile of rumpled, newly-washed towels is anything but.
The key that a University of California-Berkeley group of engineers and computer scientists came up with was figuring out how to get robots -- which is another way of saying the computer program running a robot -- to deal with 'deformable objects," things whose shapes are not predictable.
Doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and professor Pieter Abbeel, of Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, worked out an algorithm that allowed the robot to use high-resolution cameras to estimate the towel's shape, then find two adjacent corners and begin the process of folding.
Their robot, built by the Menlo Park robotics company Willow Garage, does a fascinating dance as it scans the towel and then, after much estimating, beings to fold it.
In a remarkable display of anthropomorphizing on the part of the viewer, when it gets to the point of laying the towel on a table surface to complete the task, it suddenly morphs from being a slightly odd machine to a fussy grandmother smoothing a pile of laundry.
Equally remarkable, there already existed a body of work in the computer world on robotic laundry and towel folding. It's all part of creating programs that can deal with the complex unexpectedness of the physical world.
What the Berkeley group did that had been difficult before was to get the robot over the hump of dealing with a towel in a pile in an unknown and arbitrary configuration to a known, predictable shape where it could start applying its folding algorithms.
The group's created a new vision-based approach to detecting the key points on the cloth, which depend upon geometric cues the robot can reliably identify.
Presented with 50 previously unseen towels in variety of positions (read: really smushed up) the robot managed to neatly fold all of them. The scientists will report on their research at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2010 in Anchorage in May. Their paper is available online.
By Elizabeth Weise
Visit Science Fair for your daily dose of scientific news, from dinosaurs to distant galaxies. Science Fair is written by science reporters Dan Vergano and Elizabeth Weise and weather reporter Doyle Rice. Their subjects are often controversial -- and always fascinating -- be they stem-cell research, slime mold, or underground slush on Mars. More about the team