Is a laundry-hanging arm's gain from picking a free garment real? A paired test on 2000 loads

What it found

hanger-avoid left aiming's gain from avoiding a clash unproven. Pairing wait and avoid on the same 2000 seeded loads (two arms, load 25) gives, at 0.30 m clearance, +1.25 garments an hour for aiming (95% bootstrap interval 0.60 to 1.92), +4.4 for sweeping and +10.0 for blind pinching; at 0.45 m aiming gains +0.15 (−0.05 to 0.36). Pairing halves the standard error against unpaired intervals, yet avoiding wins on only about half of single loads for aiming (load-to-load SD about 15 an hour). Stylised: clearance, station times and the pile are hanger-avoid's placeholders; only the statistics are tightened.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Laundry-hanging robots

• 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.
• Does the hanger a sim loop designs change for stretchy, heavy knits, and what does a tee-designed hanger cost them?Does the hanger that hanger-fit's CMA-ES designs change for stretchy, heavy knits? The best arm width moves from +0.9 cm past the half shoulder (tee) to +1.5–1.8 cm (EA 40 N/m), but slope, bow and end radius are not pinned down at 150 scores; a tee hanger scores 1.06 cm on a soft double-weight knit against 0.52 cm for one designed for it. Fabric constants swept, not measured.

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.