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Laundry Bot Folds Towels Very, Very Slowly

by Terrence O'Brien on April 4, 2010 at 12:30 PM

Laundry Bot Folds Towels, Very Slowly

Doing laundry itself isn't half bad, since you have machines that do the washing and drying for you. But folding? That's a different story altogether. Our t-shirts rarely come out of our laundry bag until it's time for them to be worn, and just end up completely wrinkled, as a result. But those days may be coming to an end as researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have taught a robot to fold towels.

The bot easily folded 50 individual towels and five stacked towels, the latter of which it had not been expressly programmed to fold, by using a grasping and folding algorithm. The downside is the robot's slower-than-grandma pace, taking an average of almost 25 minutes to fold each towel. At that rate, our laundry would still be wrinkled by the time it hit our dresser drawers.

Still, it's nice to know that somewhere out there scientists are hard at work figuring out how let us remain lazy, yet look less slovenly. Check out the (incredibly sped-up) video below to see the bot in action. [From: Cnet]


Tags: automatic, folding, laundry, robot, Robots, top, towels, UniversityOfCalifornia

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