Today we celebrated the PhD defence of Victor-Louis De Gusseme who worked on robots for domestic laundry.

His research tackles one of the most stubborn challenges in robotics: teaching robots to handle laundry. While machines already wash and dry clothes, tasks like unfolding, folding, and hanging remain extremely difficult because cloth is soft, deformable, and unpredictable.

His work approached this challenge from several angles: mapping the entire laundry process to identify research gaps, using simulation to explore folding strategies, building real robotic systems that combine vision and touch, and creating the first standardized benchmark and dataset for cloth unfolding. His system won international competitions at IROS 2022 and ICRA 2023, and the benchmark was validated with 11 teams at the ICRA 2024 Cloth Manipulation Competition.

His research shows that progress in cloth manipulation requires both smarter adaptive strategies and shared benchmarks, moving us closer to the vision of household robots that can truly assist with everyday chores.