UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, working with Prof. Pieter Abbeel, has developed
software that enables a robot to fold towels. From the abstract to their scientific paper:
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 ï¬nally stacks the
folded towel in a target location. The reliability and robustness
of our algorithm enables for the ï¬rst 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.
“Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding” (Thanks, Ken Goldberg!)