Automatic laundry folding

Laundry folding problem from randomly located laundry in a container.

In this setting, an robot arm actuator is capable of holding and handling clothes. How that is done is matter of another post or idea, but we focus on how we would algorithmically achieve (as with artificial intelligence which just learns the algorithm from patterns from learning data).

Given a laundry item Lᵢ with random folding 𝓕. First step is to defolding the folding to achieve planar configuration of the clothing 𝒫. Usually when we do it, the gravity does partly the work, with cloth connective threads pulling it in a way that it is detangled, mostly if it can.
There is this grasp poses algorithm which claims to fold the laundry from any configuration: Bersch, Christian, Benjamin Pitzer, and Sören Kammel. “Bimanual robotic cloth manipulation for laundry folding.” 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE, 2011.

Defolding can be done through grasping on the selective points when the cloth becomes straight planar when holding, after which point its a matter of folding it along specific axes in manner that allows for that cloth to be stably folded.

1.Pick at grasp points and let gravity do the work of defolding.

2. Lay on planar surface then fold at required axes sequentially or parallel to achieve the desired fold.

The obtained fold doesn’t seem to be professional, which however, would be attained with precision after ironing it, or at least would require stretching to align the corners perfectly.