Laundry Bot

Laundry Bot The special PR2 bot is

the result of a collaboration between University of California-Berkeley researchers and the gadget guys at Willow Garage. The Robot very carefully inspects and then folds a pile of unfamiliar towels of various sizes on a table, sped up 50 times, than a normal person.

Laundry Bot in action…

Willow Garage is giving out eleven PR2 Beta robots at no cost to leading research institutions in robotics:

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Bosch Georgia Institute of Technology Katholieke Universiteit Leuven MIT CSAIL Stanford University Technische Universität München University of California, Berkeley University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab University of Southern California University of Tokyo, JSK Robotics Laboratory

Laundry Bot

Here, is a video that demonstrates the tasks of the Laundry Bot.

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=72150006

Laundry Bot It takes the Laundry Bot 25 minutes

per towel. The Robot has a special magnification

camera that scans the towel to measure the shape to find the two adjacent angles.

The Laundry Bot was created for working moms, and hotel maids.

Laundry Bot

“The robot begins by picking up a randomly dropped towel from a table, goes through a sequence of vision-based re-grasps and manipulations-- partially in the air, partially on the table--and finally stacks the folded towel in a target location. 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.”

-Ken Goldberg

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