A robot that can pick up several bits of clothing at once from a pile strewn across the floor could be used to help tidy messy bedrooms.
Picking up piles of clothes and grasping multiple items simultaneously may be straightforward for a human, but actions such as working out where the clothes’ edges are and how to group them together pose problems for a robot.
Ken Goldberg at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have developed a robot system to address what they call the “teenager’s problem” of how to most efficiently pick up strewn clothes. It…
