Live Robot Hack Session

Botmatrix Live Hack Session 9

When:
Duration:
17 people have subscribed to this event

Folding clothes is a pain in trousers but what if we had a robot to do it for us!?! There is a product that does this very thing. The Foldimate is slated to be released later this year in the $1000 range, but what if you don't have the space or the cash to afford such a time saving device?

This week we'll be exploring the idea of building a budget friendly laundry folding robot. The recipe will be a folding board, some HDD servos, camera, and IoTiny. Will the recipe be a flop or are we onto something?

I would also like to add object and voice recognition to the project to make it easy to command the folding robot to do different folds based on pants, shirts, etc.

Join the live chat and add your comment, ideas, and suggestions!


ARC Pro

Upgrade to ARC Pro

ARC Pro is your passport to a world of endless possibilities in robot programming, waiting for you to explore.

PRO
Belgium
#1   — Edited

sounds like lots of fun.lol

PRO
Canada
#2   — Edited

Update This Live Hack is happening this Friday at 7pm MST, see you then!

If you tune in definitely leave me a comment and I'll say "Hi" ;)

#4  

Hi Jeremie, Great hack. Fun little tool for geekie people like us.

I have two questions;

1). Why did the Fold Right frame run twice when you only had it listed once in this Action? 2). I see when you adjusted the servo speed for the only servo in the first frame it seemed to affect the other servo's speed also throughout the entire Action. Am I seeing that wrong? If so, In the AutoPosistion control do you only need to set the first servo's speed in each action and the rest of the servos will also adjust to that speed?

PRO
Canada
#5  

Thanks guys! Knocked another project off my list and hopefully this one will save me some time!

@Dave I’m not sure which action you’re referring to but whenever there was odd behavior it was usually because the speech recognition was picking up false positives. I was able to remedy that behavior by pausing the speech recognition after the first positive.

That’s correct you only need to change the speed on the first frame and if the rest are set to -1 then they will all match the speed of the first frame.

#6  

Ahh thanks, The -1 is the key to the whole thing I was forgetting.

I swear your shirt folding contraption operated the left side twice each time. I didn't watch the whole scripting process. Did you have a statement in the script that moves the folding arms again if the camera sees that the shirt didn't drop off the folding arm?

PRO
Canada
#7  

Aw yes, there was a left side fold a second time to fold the small remaining sleeve of the T-shirt. Not a big deal, I can probably remove the second fold, but that’s the way they teach you with the folding board.

That’s a good idea to have the camera check if the fold completed properly but no I didn’t implement that.

#8  

Fantastic and practical hack Jeremie!!  This one was inspiring to see you take an idea and have a working prototype folding clothes in such a short amount of time!!!!

PRO
Canada
#9  

And on that note Laundroid the company that had the commercial clothes folding robot just went under to the tune of 20M https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/23/laundroid-robot-seven-dreamers-bankruptcy/

PRO
Canada
#10  

Oh man, it seems more and more robotics hardware companies are failing that's the second one I heard of this week. The first being Anki, who had over $200M in funding and still collapsed.

Luckily there is still one more laundry folding robot that might still make it, the Foldimate: https://foldimate.com/

Otherwise, we'll be depending on my robot, which still needs some tweaking :D.