Human insights inspire solutions for household robots

People typically consider doing the laundry to be a boring chore. But laundry is far from boring for artificial intelligence researchers. To AI experts, programming a robot to do the laundry represents a challenging planning problem because current sensing and manipulation technology is not good enough to identify precisely the number of clothing pieces that are in a pile and the number that are picked up with each grasp. People can easily cope with this type of uncertainty and come up with a simple plan. But roboticists for decades have struggled to design an autonomous system able to do what we do so casually–clean our clothes. …read more