It seems like every week there’s a new video of a robot folding clothes. We’ve had some fantastic demonstrations, like this semi-autonomous video from Weave Robotics on X.
It’s awesome stuff, but Weave is far from the only company producing these kinds of videos. Figure 02 is folding clothes. Figure 03 is folding clothes. Physical Intelligence launched their flagship vision-language-action model, pi0, with an amazing video of a robot folding clothes after unloading a laundry machine. You can see robots folding clothes live at robotics expos. Even before all this, Google showed clothes folding in their work, ALOHA unleashed. 7X Tech is even planning to sell robots to fold clothes!
And besides folding actual clothes, there are other clothes-folding-like tasks, like Dyna’s napkin folding— which leads to what is probably my top robot video of the year, demonstrating 18 hours of continuous napkin folding. So why are all of these robotic manipulation companies suddenly into folding?
Reason 1: We basically couldn’t do this before
There’s work going back over a decade that shows some amount of robotic clothes folding. But these demonstrations were extremely brittle, extremely slow, and not even remotely production ready. Previous solutions existed (even learning based solutions!) but they relied on precise camera calibration, or on carefully hand-designed features, meaning that these clothes folding demos generally worked only on one robot, in one environment, and may have only ever worked a single time—just enough for the recording of a demo video or paper submission.
With a little bit of help from a creatively patterned shirt, PR2 was folding things back in 2014. Bosch/IEEE
Take a look at this example of UC Berkeley’s PR2 folding laundry from 2014. This robot is, in fact, using a neural network policy. But that policy is very small and brittle; it picks and places objects against the same green background, moves very slowly, and can’t handle a wide range of shirts. Making this work in practice would require larger models, pretrained on web-scale data, and better, more general techniques for imitation learning.
And so 10 years later, with the appropriate demonstration data, many different startups and research labs have been able to implement clothes-folding demos; it’s something we have seen from numerous hobbyists and startups, using broadly similar tools (like LeRobot from HuggingFace), without intense specialization.
Reason 2: It looks great and people want it!
Many of us who work in robotics have this ‘north star’ of a robot butler which can do all the chores we don’t want to do. Mention clothes folding, and many, many people will chime in about how they don’t ever want to fold clothes again and are ready to part with basically any amount of money to make that happen.
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