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About

Kyoko Hamajima is a robotics researcher whose career has been dedicated to solving one of domestic automation's most deceptively complex challenges: enabling robots to handle laundry. Working at the intersection of robotic manipulation, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, Hamajima has focused specifically on developing planning strategies that allow robots to manage deformable, non-rigid textile objects — a problem that exposes the profound limitations of conventional robotic systems. Her most influential work, "Planning Strategy for Task of Unfolding Clothes" (2000), has accumulated 46 citations and represents a cornerstone contribution to household robotics. Across a sustained research program spanning the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, she tackled successive sub-problems of laundry automation: isolating individual garments from tangled washed masses, classifying clothing types, and systematically unfolding crumpled items — challenges that require sophisticated environmental perception and adaptive decision-making. Hamajima's research gained particular relevance against the backdrop of Japan's aging population, framing domestic robotics not merely as technological novelty but as a social necessity. With over 110 cumulative citations across her publications, her foundational contributions helped establish laundry manipulation as a recognized and serious subfield within household robotics research.