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.