Remember those crazy fast robotic hands that can dribble a ball in the blink of an eye? A research group from the University of Tokyo has been teaching them to fold towels (very small towels) at blistering speed, poking some fun at Berkeley's PR2 and its rather more, um, sedate pace.
What the researchers figured out was that if you move something deformable (like a piece of cloth) fast enough, it'll just follow the motion path of whatever it's attached to, and you don't have to worry about niggling little annoyances like the effects of gravity. Using this method, it's possible to calculate the path that the cloth will take, enabling a robot to fold super fast it as in the video above.
These high speed hands were able to fold a cloth in half in an average of 0.4 second with a success rate of about 80 percent, but researchers hope to improve that with the addition of an improved visual feedback system (similar to the one they use to scan a book just by flipping its pages) that will be able to tell the hands exactly when to close. Eventually, the hope is to teach the hands to fold a more versatile range of objects, along with crazier things like high-speed origami.
This research was presented by Yuji Yamakawa, Akio Namiki, and Masatoshi Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo and Chiba University, in their ICRA paper entitled "Motion Planning for Dynamic Folding of a Cloth with Two High-speed Robot Hands and Two High-speed Sliders."
[ Ishikawa Oku Lab ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
