Teaching a Robot to Fold Laundry Took Four Arms, 200 Demonstrations, and an Overnight Retraining Session
Robot Learns to Fold Laundry in a Day
Steven Gong and fellow University of Waterloo engineering students built a robot that can retrieve a shirt, straighten it, fold it, and place it on a stack. Two human-operated leader arms control two follower arms while cameras record the process; the team collected about 200 demonstrations for training.
Early models either failed to begin the task or moved violently enough to break a 3D-printed gripper. The team eventually fine-tuned a robotics foundation model, then had to collect more data after moving the setup to a new building changed the lighting. By the next morning, the system could complete the folding sequence autonomously.
A chore that takes a person less than a minute required four robot arms, hundreds of demonstrations, a broken gripper, and an overnight model search. Laundry has excellent scaling properties.