4 ms·
Using $300 robot arms and a MacBook to fold a T-shirt
- billconan 2y agoso what limits the speed of the robots? is it computation? or is it mechanics?
- ragebol 2y agomotion blur in the cameras? IIUC, the controller needs to see what pose the arms are in, run inference on that and compute a next step of movement. If there's motion blur, especially with a simple rolling shutter webcam in the macbook, being too fast breaks the vision? That maybe, plus compute I suppose.
- pyuser314 2y agoThese projects are great!
- atonse 2y agoVery cool, many of us here, I'm sure have dreamt of this sort of thing whenever we fold clothes, but you've made it a reality. Hope to see rapid progress on this!
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoYou may benefit from buying a folding board
- wenc 2y agoYes. Most of the work in folding clothes is in garment positioning. If you can train robot arms to uncrumple a shirt from the wash and position it, you're 90% of the way there. The folding itself is trivial with a folding board (10% of the work) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZpkh40AlLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZpkh40AlLE Even without a folding board, you can do a 2-second pinch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6rjbw0ZA0&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6rjbw0ZA0&t=27s
- atonse 2y agoI don't know, this looks great for T-shirts but how about for various undergarments, dresses, pants, sweatpants, jeans, etc?
- linotype 2y agoThe steps engineers will take to avoid chores! :)
- dinobones 2y agoPut it on wheels. Give it a chute for dirty clothes. I'd happily pay 10x this ($3,000) to never do laundry again if it meant nicely folded clothes would always await me in my closet.
- Something1234 2y agoHe has 4 arms there. So $1200 minimum and they look super flakey like they can't dig into a laundry basket.
- doublerebel 2y agoThis imitates a human who does a mediocre job of folding shirts. This shirt will end up wrinkled. I’d be much more interested to see either: - a robot trained on experienced clothing retail sales associates (can fold a shirt like this in a single movement), or - a non-human folding technique optimized for the robot arms (having multiple fingers and more arm+hand mobility is part of what makes the human single-move fold possible). Source: Have worked at Gap, Nordstrom, others…
- AlotOfReading 2y agoFor context, folding clothes is a traditionally difficult problem in robotics you do as a benchmark for how capable your system is. When I worked for a manufacturer less than a decade ago, we were still deciding against doing it at trade shows because the reliability wasn't high enough yet. The fact that it's hard to get right is the whole point and why the Twitter post is emphasizing that it's being done with very little work on cheap arms.
- genpfault 2y agoArms in question: [1] TIL Dynamixel servos can be had for less than $ALL_YOUR_BUDGET! [1]: https://github.com/jess-moss/koch-v1-1 https://github.com/jess-moss/koch-v1-1
- realusername 2y agoIt's probably easier to build an automated folding table than going through the robotic arm route?
- artninja1988 2y agoIt's a tech/ research demo
- wenc 2y agoInteresting -- I looked up automated folding tables [1] but even those don't have automatic positioning. I'm curious: how do they fold with high throughput? I can't imagine shirts are folded manually at industrial scale. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVf-1ka36w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVf-1ka36w
- cosmotic 2y agoWouldn't the hard part be grabbing the shirt from the pile and spreading it out flat?
- Gys 2y agoThey should first have researched how to quickly fold a t-shirt. It can be done in two seconds with little handling and some practise. I guess even by using only two robot arms. See for example https://youtu.be/uz6rjbw0ZA0 https://youtu.be/uz6rjbw0ZA0