How many dryers can a laundry-hanging cell serve when its fold station runs at published robot speeds?

What it found

The hanger-cell model assumed a 25 s fold station and found the arm was the limit (5.1 dryers). Replacing 25 s with the cycle times in Table I of the SpeedFolding paper (Avigal et al. 2022: 68 s for a towel, 88 s fling-to-fold, 117 s t-shirt, 167 s max-value-map baseline, with 80 to 93% fold success) makes the fold table the bottleneck at 98% busy: one arm and one table serve 1.3 dryers at the t-shirt time (0.8 to 2.1 across the rows). With two arms, five dryers need 3 to 10 fold tables depending on the row (5 at 117 s). Prior art at 3 to 6 folds per hour would need more than 40. Hanging every garment instead of folding doubles output at the same tables, but hang-or-fold is a quality choice (hanger-fold), not a throughput one. Fold times and success rates are sourced from one paper measured on one robot and 15 trials per row; the other station times (pick, sense, rail, feeder) are still assumed placeholders from hanger-cell.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

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

More in Laundry-hanging robots

• 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.
• Should a laundry-hanging arm also steer clear of the other arm's next pick? A paired test on 1000 loadsShould a laundry-hanging arm also steer clear of the other arm's next pick? No: paired on 1000 loads, lookahead loses to avoiding the current pick in 14 of 18 settings and ties in 4, by up to 11 an hour. Stylised: inputs are placeholders.
• What does it cost two laundry-hanging arms to empty the same dryer pile?What does it cost two laundry-hanging arms to empty one dryer pile and wait for each other? Blocking at 0.30 m clearance takes aiming from 201 to 191 garments an hour and blind pinching from 179 to 151; a third arm adds only 3 to 5. Stylised: clearance and spacing assumed.
• Can a laundry hanger be printed in two halves on a 220 mm bed, and is the bolted joint strong enough?Can a laundry hanger be printed in two halves on a 220 mm bed, and is the bolted joint strong enough? A half-lap hub joint with two M4 bolts lets every width up to XXL print on a 220 mm bed; the joint (safety factor 3.7–13) is then weaker than the arm (40–70), and printed pegs fail. Stylised, assumed material constants; nothing printed.

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.