[doublerebel]

This imitates a human who does a mediocre job of folding shirts. This shirt will end up wrinkled.

I’d be much more interested to see either:

- a robot trained on experienced clothing retail sales associates (can fold a shirt like this in a single movement), or

- a non-human folding technique optimized for the robot arms (having multiple fingers and more arm+hand mobility is part of what makes the human single-move fold possible).

Source: Have worked at Gap, Nordstrom, others…

[AlotOfReading]

For context, folding clothes is a traditionally difficult problem in robotics you do as a benchmark for how capable your system is. When I worked for a manufacturer less than a decade ago, we were still deciding against doing it at trade shows because the reliability wasn't high enough yet.

The fact that it's hard to get right is the whole point and why the Twitter post is emphasizing that it's being done with very little work on cheap arms.