for anyone packing for their holidays this year, getting their clothes to fit neatly inside their bags is always a struggle but robotics engineers have now come up with what they say is the best way to fold a variety of clothes into neat little rectangles their findings, of course, are intended to help a new generation of robots take on some of our more monotonous household chores the diagram above shows the approach outlined by the scientists for folding a jumper or long sleeved t shirt  however, their work has also revealed the most effective ways of folding clothing so it can be stacked and packed away that may also help humans too they use a principal that they have called the 'g fold'   where clothing is laid out on a flat surface and gravity is used to help assist the folding of clothing it could be the ultimate home help   able to find your dirty clothes, wash them, and even fold them before neatly putting them away the robot developed by researchers at the university of california berkeley is able to wash and fold clothes, recognise different items so they can be folded neatly away using willow garage's $280,000 personal robot 2, the researchers have been able to get their robot to take washing out oa basket, place them in a washer the semi humanoid robot is 'roughly the size of a person' and features two arms, claw like 'gripper' hands, a front facing screen head, and a tilting hokuyo laser scanner that continuously flaps up and down like an ever chattering mouth for a jumper, for example, they suggest folding the sleeves in half first at the elbow and then folding them in at the shoulders they then suggest folding the body of the jumper into the middle from both sides before then folding it in half with a pair of trousers they suggest folding them along the crotch and then down the middle the approach is published in a research paper describing how domestic robots can help around the home dr pieter abbeel, an associate professor in computer science at the university of california berkeley, and his colleagues who have been conducting the research, said they attempted to solve the problem of folding clothing by treating it as a problem of geometry they said: 'spread crudley on a table, real world clothing items do not perfectly resemble simple polygons 'they contain curves rather than straight lines, corners which are rounded rather than sharp, and small intricacies which no two articles of a given class will necessarily share 'rather than reason explicitly about these complex shapes, we wish to transpose them as best we can into a shape which we know how to fold' the researchers have now used their findings to help develop a robot that is able to sort and fold laundry they developed software that allowed the willow garage personal robot to grip clothes with claw like gripper hands and lay it out on a flat surface this is the technique the engineers recommended for folding up a standard t shirt into a neat rectangle  folding a pair of trousers or jeans requires just the simplest of folds shown above according to the research  the approach outlined above shows how the researchers recommend folding a variety of different clothing  the researchers have written software that enables a robot to fold clothing into neat rectangles (shown above) it is then able to assess them best way of folding the clothing based on its shape using cameras and shape recognition software, the robot is able to recognise where folds should be made and use its grippers to perform them in a series of tests they found the robot was able to fold up to 40 different articles of clothing, including trousers, towels, sweaters and t shirts for a t shirt, for example, they calculated it required just five folds, while a jumper requires seven folds folding a towel might seem simple but for a robot it requires the ability to use some complex geometry  writing in a paper in a new journal on household robotic services, the researchers said: 'the g fold method worked reasonably well on pants 'it was also able to fold a collared shirt quite neatly, despite that its rigid collar and buttons are not expressible in the language of our model' they did warn, however, that the thickness of the cloth could interfere with the folding and in order to achieve truly neat folds it may be necessary to use an iron their approach contrasts with other suggest folding methods recently an approach known as the japanese folding method, where a t shirt is folded by gripping just two points on the cloth, has become popular others, such as researchers at the university of oklahoma, have recommended packing bags using the bundle method this, they claim, allows clothes to be bundled into a relatively small bag without while minimising the number of creases they have those of a more military background, however, often prefer an approach known as 'ranger rolling' where clothes are rolled up into tight little bundles however dr  abbeel and his team said: 'while this study dealt explicitly with the task of laundry folding, we believe the tools put forth may generalize well beyond this to many deformable object manipulation challenges, such as ironing or bed making 'we hope that these results will provide another step forward on the long road toward the utopian future, where humans are never again nagged to 'do their chores''
university of california berkeley
engineers at university of california berkeley assessed folding techniques  they conducted the work to help develop robots that can do the laundry  they recommend using a 'g fold' where clothes are folded on a flat surface  t shirts, jumpers and trousers can be folded with this into neat rectangles  researchers hope it will lead to robots that can take on household chores 