Menu

Multimedia

The robot that folds your laundry

He doesn't play soccer, he doesn't fight, but he does fold laundry. And while he may not do it as well as Mom, make no mistake, this is a technical feat that's far from negligible. Here's another step toward the widespread use of humanoid assistants in our daily lives: the laundry-folding robot.

"Folding laundry sounds trivial to a human, but it's one of the most challenging manipulation tasks for a humanoid robot," explains Figure, which produces this model called Figure 03. "Towels constantly change shape, fold unpredictably, and tend to wrinkle or tangle. There's no fixed geometry to memorize, nor a single "correct" gripping point."

Besides the machine, it's Figure's AI model called Helix that does much of the work. In this video, we see, for example, how Helix unifies voice command understanding, awareness of surroundings, adaptation, and coordination.

The Figure of the Future££££

"We believe humanoids will revolutionize a wide range of industries, from corporate jobs (over 3 billion humans), to home care (over 2 billion), to elderly care (around 1 billion), to building new worlds on other planets," explains Brett Adcock, Founder & CEO. "However, our first applications will be in sectors such as manufacturing, shipping and logistics, warehousing, and retail, where labor shortages are most severe."

By the way, if you want to see Figure sorting parcels for an hour, click here.