Does a second laundry-hanging arm lose less if it picks a free garment instead of waiting?
research/hanger-avoid
Does a second laundry-hanging arm lose less if it picks a free garment instead of waiting? At 0.30 m clearance blind pinching recovers 9.5 of its 28 lost garments an hour (151 to 161), aiming about 2 of 10; at 0.45 m nothing. Stylised: clearance and spacing assumed.
What it found
Two arms on one hanger-pick pile in the hanger-cell model; an arm whose choice would clash with the other arm's current pick (grasps closer than a clearance) picks the best garment that does not, and waits only if none is left. At 0.30 m blind pinching recovers 9.5 of the 28 garments an hour that blocking cost it (151 to 161), sweeping 5 (186 to 191), aiming about 1.6 of 10 (191 to 192, inside its interval). At 0.45 m nearly every pair clashes and it recovers nothing; with avoidance a third arm adds about 7.5 an hour at 0.30 m. Stylised: the clearance, the spacing time and all station times are assumed, not measured.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Laundry-hanging robots
- Is a laundry-hanging arm's gain from picking a free garment real? A paired test on 2000 loadsIs a laundry-hanging arm's gain from picking a free garment real? Paired on 2000 loads at 0.30 m: aiming +1.25 an hour (0.60 to 1.92), sweeping +4.4, pinching +10.0; at 0.45 m aiming gains nothing. Stylised: inputs are placeholders.
- How many dryers can one laundry-hanging arm serve once the pick is simulated, not assumed?How many dryers can one laundry-hanging arm serve once the pick is simulated, not assumed? A one-arm cell drops from 169 to 147 garments an hour (5.1 to 4.4 dryers) with look-then-aim picking and to 104 with blind pinching; with two arms the fold table is the limit. Stylised.
- How many dryers can a laundry-hanging arm serve when the fold takes as long as published robots take?How many dryers can a laundry-hanging arm serve when folding takes as long as published robots take? At SpeedFolding's 90–120 s per fold the learned-rule cell falls from 169 to 58–44 garments an hour; always hanging holds 146. Only the fold time is sourced.
- How many dryers can a laundry-hanging cell serve when its fold station runs at published robot speeds?How many dryers can a laundry-hanging cell serve when its fold station runs at published robot speeds? Timed from the SpeedFolding paper (68 to 167 s per garment) rather than an assumed 25 s, one arm and one fold table serve 0.8 to 2.1 dryers instead of 5.1, and with two arms five dryers need 3 to 10 fold tables. Fold times are sourced; every other station time is still assumed.
- Does the hanger-fit width rule hold on fabrics with published KES-FB bending rigidity and weight?Does "arm 1 cm wider than the half shoulder" hold on four fabrics with published KES-FB bending rigidity (0.0066–0.125) and weight (12.5–24.6 mg/cm²)? Best offset is +1 cm in all 12 cases (with stretch swept 40–800 N/m); heavy suiting at 40 N/m nearly ties with +2 cm. B and weight sourced; stretch swept; tee geometry assumed.
- Does it matter that the garment a robot picks is also the garment it decides to hang or fold?Does it matter that the garment a robot picks is also the garment it decides to hang or fold? Linking them moves a one-arm cell from 147 to 141 garments an hour, but two arms swing from 141 to 250 with an assumed kind-to-archetype map. Stylised.
All 25 Laundry-hanging robots projects →
Other research topics
Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1
Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.