And just to be clear, this is still not "convincing performance" since it is still the WYSIWIG model of robotics in the sense that it can only do exactly what you see it doing in the videos. It can fold a couple of shirts and a pair of pants and wouldn't, e.g., be able to fold my hoodies, never mind a bra or something else with straps.
The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first):
Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.
The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first):
Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.