Robot Does Laundry (More or Less)

While the robot teaching itself to cook is still struggling, here's a robot that's nearly mastered another household task: laundry. Putting dirty clothes into a hamper and moving them to a washing machine isn't especially hard for humans. But for a robot, the chore is a challenge because it involves some uncertainty. "The exact number of clothes in the heap and the number that may be picked up with each grasp cannot be determined precisely," write University of California, Berkeley, computer scientist Siddarth Srivastava and his coauthors. "Doing the laundry thus represents a challenging planning problem." When you start loading dirty t-shirts into a hamper, you may not know how many there are, or how many trips to the washer you'll need to take. This probably doesn't bother you too much. But a robot would prefer to know what it's doing before it starts. The researchers solved this problem by ...