Hate tidying? Scientists develop a cleaning ROBOT that can pick up messy clothes strewn across the bedroom

It’s a problem that drives the parents of most teens crazy.

But clothes piled up on the bedroom floor may soon become a problem of the past, as scientists have developed a cleaning robot to pick up dirty laundry.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, say their clothes-collecting robot solves the “teen problem.” On how to capture clutter most efficiently.

Using a combination of color and depth-sensing cameras, the robot collects laundry into piles before finding the best spot to pick up the clothes.

Professor Ken Goldberg, lead author of the study, says this technology could become commercially available this decade, meaning we may all soon have a robotic assistant around the house.

Named after the Chinese Postman Problem, a popular mathematical puzzle, the problem asks a teenager how to clean a room with the fewest trips to the basket.

While a human may be able to pick up all the items at once, a robot equipped with a grasper may only be able to pick up a few of them at a time, and thus must be efficient.

To solve this problem, Professor Goldberg designed an artificial intelligence that can pick up clothes by controlling a robotic arm.

Professor Goldberg told MailOnline: ‘He teaches himself by repeatedly running a cycle where he picks up clothes from a flat surface, puts them in a basket, then drops the basket back onto the flat surface, and repeats.’

Although this may seem unnecessarily messy, Professor Goldberg says this allows the robot to “learn” how to optimize the number of clothes it can carry on each trip.

In the experiment, the AI ​​repeated this cycle 200 times and picked up more than 2,000 items of clothing in the process.

The scientists initially tried two different techniques, one using a standard color camera and the other using a special depth-sensing camera.

A color camera can locate clothing but often fails to find the best spot to capture several pieces of clothing at once.

The depth-sensing camera, on the other hand, was great at seeing where a lot of clothes were piled up, but it had difficulty understanding individual clothes.

Professor Goldberg and his colleagues say each of these methods reduced the number of trips needed to disinfect a room by about 20 percent.

However, when combined with the ability to stack clothes into piles, the robot can become 67% more efficient.

Asked if the technology could become commercially available soon, Professor Goldberg told MailOnline: “We hope so.” Millions of teens (and their parents) depend on it!

“Being able to efficiently pick up clothes could be very useful for seniors, in hospitals, hotels, and in retail clothing stores,” he adds.

However, Goldberg also says this won’t be immediately available since “current mobile robots with attached arms are a bit too expensive to justify for home use.”

This robot would also not be the ideal home assistant yet as it currently lacks the ability to sort clothes by color.

However, the researchers suggest that the ability to sort would be a “natural fit” for techniques used to improve grip.

As robots become more sophisticated and more widely available, some experts believe we may be on the verge of a future free of routine tasks.

A recent study published by Oxford University estimates that nearly 40% of household chores will be automated by 2023.

The researchers point out that grocery shopping will be the area where robots will take up most of the slack, as 59% of the effort will be transferred to robots and algorithms.

Previous research has shown that Britons spend around 43% of the total time they spend working and studying on unpaid work, including household tasks such as tidying and cleaning.

If this robot cleaner comes to market, it will join a growing number of robot chefs, cleaners, caregivers and workers.

The creators of these home robots say that they will soon be able to do any work that a human can do.