this came up on my RSS news feed…

is anyone else totally unimpressed with it?! ok, i guess it takes a lot of tech to get it to do it, fair play… but its folding towels FFS… could they not find something more useful for it to do? 😕

the japanese know what i'm on about…

i cant be arsed to fold towls so it seems like a useful thing.

If it is a robot surely it should be killing prople, or saving people, depending on the robot?

Get off my show, mate.

£1000?

Entertainment factor of 5 mins before kids get bored!

(Appreciate the tech that went into it)

That towel folding robot look thoroughly disillusioned with his job.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

4. A robot must ensure that the laundry is correctly folded at all times as long as this does not conflict with the First, Second or Third Law.

one day a robot will clean my bike.

that day, i will be impressed.

Coming from a robotics/computer vision background I can tell you that's no mean feat for a robot. Not exactly groundbreaking, but not anything like as easy as humans perceive it to be. I'm impressed. But I'm used to being impressed by stuff that others think is boring lol.

Useless robot machine

That video is also sped up by a factor of 50. It took 25 minutes to fold a towel…

yup. It's down to the fact that it's very hard for a computer to perceive the towel as a towel when it's all jumbled up. It's trying to identify, from the creases using a massive set of algorithms, exactly how those creases would unfold to form a flat sheet. When you look at a towel you probably jump to a corner and feel along an edge for the other corner. The robot can't do that, it needs to grab what (from what I can see) is to it a 2D object, rotate it until it thinks it knows how it's creased up, then try to un-fold it along those creases until it slowly becomes more like the flat plane it knows it should approximate to. Once it's uncreased it and got it by the corners it should only take a few seconds to re-fold it correctly but it does seem to take an absolutely inordinate amount of time to do that bit, I can only assume they put the majority of the effort into the unfolding algorithms and not the rather simple automated folding task!

It took 25 minutes to fold a towel…

Don't be so negative. With years of research and billions of dollars they'll get it down to about 5 minutes.

[chuckles at jon1973] 🙂

jon1973 – Member

It took 25 minutes to fold a towel…

Don't be so negative. With years of research and billions of dollars they'll get it down to about 5 minutes.

By which time it will be cheaper than paying national insurance for someone to do it!

Don't be so negative. With years of research and billions of dollars they'll get it down to about 5 minutes.

To be fair this sort of research is usually done by a PhD student as a route to further learning, or as a fun project in spare time, not as a multi-million pound project with a team of specialists.

The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago………… And that was with a coffee machine.

i'm genuinely impressed!

robots are tricky, especially robots that you want to see things, make sense of them, and adjust their behaviour accordingly.

some of the vision/robot/vision geeks in my office have been watching that video with keen interest.

Holy cow! That is absolutely staggeringly impressive!

It's an incredibly sophisticated and tactile process.. and it's extremely good at it to be honest. Remember, this is a completely dumb machine. Seems to me like this DEMO will have far reaching implications for for future robotic applications.

Genuinely impressed.

i like the freaky honda asimo…

the one that runs and does stairs

running:

Holy cow! That is absolutely staggeringly impressive!

I can quite believe that, to someone who actually knows a lot about robots, this is very impressive. To those of us whose knowledge of robots comes principally from Terminator, Wall-E, AI, Star Wars and I, Robot it is unutterably, jaw-droppingly lame. 😉

[bannatyne] unless you put it in a skirt and it comes with working 'attachments', I'm oot [bannatyne]

What about this one then? It is safe, according to Dr. Finklestein!
What happens if someone changes the Menu??

and this one, that eats flys…

What next?
No pain. No fear. Something unstoppable. They created 'THE TERMINATOR'

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.