A clothes folding machine. Yes. While I was in Aspen, folding some shirts, I began wondering what it would take to have a machine take my place. I could just toss my shirts in a bin, and out from the machine would pop perfectly folded garments. Here’s what I’m thinking.

The first step the machine would need to take is to “uncrumple” my shirts. I began looking at how I uncrumpled shirts — I would grab a few parts of the shirt and let gravity do the work. Maybe a robot could do the same? I would have a downward facing camera use an edge detection algorithm to locate any sharp corners from a 2D top view of the balled-up shirt. Then, using robotic arms to grab the identified sharp corners, I could suspend the shirt mid-air. I found that grabbing sharp corners instead of random points on the shirt would be best since sharp corners tend to be closest to the actual edges and corners of the shirt. If I just grabbed random points, the shirt would fold and twist into itself.

Now what? It’s a little less crumpled? I pretended I was a robot — grabbing two random sharp corners (I found by looking at the shirt from the top) of my shirt and lifting the it up into the air to see what happens. From a 2D perspective, now facing the hanging shirt, I could make out many more edges and corners of the shirt hanging in the air — using another helping human hand, I grabbed another sharp corner of the mildly crumpled, hanging shirt, and pulled until the shirt became taught. Progress! Even less crumpled. At this point, it seemed like the more corners, visible from a purely 2D perspective facing the shirt, I pulled on, the less crumpled the shirt became. To locate where the corners are in 3D space and grab them, the robot would have to use a few more cameras, and the edge detection algorithm would be tricky — what constitutes a sharp corner? I could also maybe have a camera (facing the hanging shirt) analyze the shirt’s 2D profile, and in combination with the edge detection algorithm, choose the best corners to pull and the best directions to pull them in to get the shirt to match the 2D profile of a regular, non-crumpled shirt… What if the shirt were too crumpled? I could have the machine toss it in the air, or jiggle the surface the shirt would be on. Lots of questions, but it feels like I’m on to something.

After being stretched out, the robotic arms could lay the shirt down, and moving flaps could fold the shirt.

Boom. Might have to make this one.