Towel-folding robot hits 99.5% success, 68% of human throughput on real laundry floor
lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-11-11
Folding towels is a classic hard manipulation problem: a towel bends, folds and slips on contact, so a grasp that worked last cycle can miss or catch three layers the next. Gobanorobotics, a team out of Nantes and London, runs an autonomous towel-folding station on a real laundry floor reporting: 99.5% task success rate, 68% of a human worker's throughput on an 18-hour shift, and 5% daily throughput improvement driven by reinforcement learning. Notably, they track task success and autonomy separately — a self-recovered miss differs from a stoppage pulling a worker over — and their throughput figure already counts recovery time, measuring work done between human interventions.
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