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Researchers empower robot to fold towels

Who wouldn’t want a robot that could make your bed or do the laundry? A team of Berkeley researchers has brought us one important step closer by, for the first time, enabling an autonomous robot to reliably fold piles of previously unseen towels. Robots that can do things like assembling cars have been around for decades. The towel-folding robot, however, is doing something very new, according to the researchers, doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and assistant professor Pieter Abbeel, both of UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

A search giant

It’s no surprise that a Google search for Peter Norvig turns up tens of thousands of hits. Norvig (Ph.D. ’86 EECS) literally wrote the book on artificial intelligence, coauthoring a bestselling textbook on the subject with Professor Stuart Russell in 1995. As the senior computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, he led the team that developed the remote artificial intelligence software that flew aboard the Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999. And today, as Google’s director of research, Norvig is transforming the way information is organized and accessed on the Web.