Muscular humanoid robot folds towel autonomously by watching humans

US startup Kinsi Robotics has developed the KR-1, a muscular humanoid robot capable of autonomously folding towels by observing human demonstrations. The robot uses simultaneous perception, planning, and dexterous manipulation to pick up towels from random positions and fold them neatly, mimicking human behavior. Central to this capability is kinesthetic teaching, a method where a human operator physically guides the robot through the task while the system records visual inputs and corresponding arm and gripper movements. This approach allows the robot to learn a flexible, adaptable skill rather than a fixed sequence, enabling it to handle varying towel configurations. Unlike rigid objects, soft deformable materials like towels pose a significant challenge for robots due to their continuously changing shape, which is difficult to model with traditional physics-based methods. Instead, KR-1 learns through repeated experience, internalizing how the towel responds to different manipulations by mapping visual cues directly to physical actions without explicit labeling of towel features. This experiment exemplifies a broader trend in robotics toward learning