From Basket to Closet: A Task-Centric Survey of Robotic Laundry

Laundry accounts for a significant share of household labor. This has motivated researchers to investigate robotic handling of domestic laundry tasks, such as folding and ironing. However, cloth manipulation has proven challenging for robots and although significant progress has been made, robotic laundry is still an unsolved problem. In this paper, we present a task-centric survey of the progress and remaining challenges in robotic cloth manipulation for domestic laundry. In contrast to existing surveys, we adopt a task-centric approach to focus our review of the literature on the specific challenges of each task. We decompose the laundry process into ten tasks: collection, sorting, loading, unloading, unfolding, hanging, unhanging, ironing, folding, and shelving. For each task, we review a representative set of works, both old and new, to analyze the state of the art, identify gaps in the literature, and suggest directions for future research. Finally, we broaden our focus to the entire robotic laundry process, highlighting that many tasks remain underexplored, discussing open questions for building robotic laundry systems, and offering recommendations to advance the field, particularly in performance evaluation and benchmarking.