| I believe every single man wants to have a robot that can help with the beds and clothes. And recently a research group at Berkeley has taken a solid step toward that goal: their autonomous robots have the ability to fold towels. "Robots have been assembling cars for decades, but folding towels have just been recently implemented." Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Berkeley, a development team, and Pieter Abbeel Introduction said. Most of the robots on the assembly line can work hard to reach the precision that human beings can not achieve under the condition of very stable structural environment. However, such a device is only suitable for repetitive work in a strict environment and has limited capability in other environments. Although the trivial things that make up the clothes and tidy up the bed look pretty small, in fact it is a real challenge for robots to sense and manipulate "metamorphosed objects." "Our work started with a few towel shapes that robots could recognize, and the robots folded the towels in accordance with standard algorithms," explains Maitin-Shepard. But the difficulty is that when a robot picks up one of a stack of towels, it can not guarantee that the shape of the towel is recognizable to itself. It must first change the shape of the towel to something that one can recognize. This is because the existing image recognition technology is more for rigid objects. And Berkeley researchers must determine the actual shape of the towel based on the image of the collected towels and the text above. Solve this problem will be very helpful to make the robot fold the towel, of course, this is a breakthrough in robotics. The team's biggest technological innovation is the development of cloth face recognition technology based on existing computer vision, which is a very efficient algorithm because it relies on solid geometric clues to deduce deformed cloths The actual shape. The method has proven to be very reliable and Berkeley's research group will release its research report at the International Robotics and Automation Conference in Anchorage in May this year. |
