Engineering
9 min read
Teaching a robot to fold a fitted sheet (we're still trying)
Towels took a week. T-shirts took a month. Fitted sheets have taken eleven months and counting. Here's why cloth is so hard.
Tomás Leal, robotics lead
Cloth is the hardest thing in the house for a robot, because it never looks the same twice. A towel dropped on a bed has thousands of possible shapes, and each one needs a different first grab.
How Tuck learns a fold
You fold one in front of him. He records the sequence of grasps, not the pixels, and then practises on his own at night with anything in the basket. A towel reaches 95% success after about forty tries.
The fitted sheet problem
Elastic corners hide their own geometry. Tuck can now find all four corners 70% of the time, and nest two of them. The last step, the one most people also get wrong, is still ours to solve.
We’ll ship it when it’s better than the average human, which is a lower bar than you might think.
Journal
