Feature
The robot that can finally fold a towel
Folding laundry has been one of robotics’ hardest problems. A lab in Zurich thinks it has cracked it, and the implications go far beyond the linen cupboard.
Technology columnist
9 min read
A robotic arm in the lab practises folding. Each attempt is recorded and used for training.
The towel is blue, slightly damp and crumpled into a ball. The robot picks it up by a corner, shakes it, finds a second corner and lays it flat. Forty seconds later, it is folded.
For a human, this is trivial. For a robot, it has been close to impossible, because soft materials change shape every time they are touched.
Why towels are hard
Robots excel at rigid objects with predictable shapes. Fabric is the opposite: it bends, folds over itself and hides its own edges. Traditional programming cannot anticipate every possibility.
The Zurich team trained its system on 40,000 hours of video showing people handling cloth, then let the robot practise on its own for months.
“The robot is not following instructions. It is guessing, the way we do,” the lab’s director said.
Beyond laundry
The same techniques apply to surgery, food handling and warehouse work, where soft or irregular objects are the norm. Several logistics companies are already testing the system, which raises the question our series Machine Made keeps returning to: who benefits when the hardest jobs become automatable?
Watch: the lab’s robot folding a towel in real time.
Ines Okafor
Technology columnist
Ines writes about technology and power, and who gets to decide what the machines are for.
