Take a load off your feet with robots
LAUNDRY ROOM GETS A TECHNOLOGICAL LIFT
Cars can now drive themselves. Cellphones talk to us. How long will it be until the dreams of every college student and overworked parent come true — and laundry can fold itself ?
At least two companies are promising to bring laundryfolding robots for the home to market by the end of 2017. Known as Laundroid and FoldiMate, both machines work by analyzing each garment they take in, figuring out its ideal folding shape and delivering a drawerready stack of smoothly folded clothes.
Laundroid is sl i ghtly smaller than a typical refrigerator and looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except with drawers. The robot arms are inside.
The FoldiMate, more compact, has large clips dangling outside, making it look like a mash-up of a clothesline and a plastic oven.
A working prototype of Laundroid — backed by about US$ 90 million in investment capital, including funds from George Roberts and Henry Kravis of the buyout firm KKR — is set to be publicly demonstrated at the end of this month in Tokyo. It will retail — only in Japan, at first — for about US$16,000. Seven Dreamers, the company introducing Laundroid, aims to bring the cost down to US$2,000 a unit and begin international sales by next year.
Judging from the intensity of the entrepreneurship going on in the field of laundry, most people would rather watch a video of Marie Kondo, author of the book The Life- Changing Magic of Tidying Up, folding a T-shirt so well it stands on its own than to actually do it with their own hands.
There’s t he i Basket, a laundry hamper that automatically washes clothes when full; EcoWasher, prom- ising “detergent- free laundry”; and DashLocker, an app- based urban laundry service.
Whirlpool Corp., owner of the Maytag brand, is also aggressively tinkering. The company plans to introduce in January an all- i n- one US$ 1,700 washer/dryer hybrid featuring a detergent reservoir that decides on the proper portion per load, squirts it into the basin unassisted and wirelessly reorders from Amazon when empty.
Neither Laundroid, which was invented in Japan, nor FoldiMate, being developed in Israel by a U. S. company, can express existential ennui as Rosey the Jetsons’ robot did, or interface with your Roomba or your Wi- Fi- enabled Mr. Coffee to create a seamless automated washi ng, vacuuming and caffeinating experience. But they do seem to be a crucial advance for in- home automation, where a thinking machine lends a genuinely useful metallic hand with the chores.
Laundroid has an insert box and four smaller drawers. Dump in up to 30 items of clean clothing and it goes to work.
“The robot arm picks up the clothes one by one and then artificial intelligence recognizes if this is a T-shirt or pants or pyjamas,” Shin Sakane, Laundroid’s inventor, said in a Skype interview from Japan.
The biggest technical challenge for both Laundroid and FoldiMate is for the machine to know what it is holding.
Because clothes are shapeless in a pile, and the robot arm will grab each i tem sometimes by t he edge, sometimes by a midpoint, “there will be no times that a garment will be picked up in the same shape,” Guy Hayazaki, a Laundroid spokesman, said.
The Laundroids will work as a team. The concept is that, using a Wi- Fi connection, the networked robot brain will connect to a server that is constantly learning best folding methods for each type of clothing by downloading data from all the other Laundroids. This hive mind promises to be able to differentiate between T- shirts, overalls and rompers, fold each according to its needs and sort them into separate piles for members of the household.
Slowly. In the first-generation Laundroid, image analysis of each garment takes up to 10 minutes; folding only a minute or two. But that adds up to nearly a full workday for a full load.
Gal Rozov, an inventor of FoldiMate, said his machine was faster. It requires users to clip each article of clothing to its front, making recognition simpler. The machine then pulls each into itself and folds.
“The whole idea is to have the experience of handing items over to a friend, who will do that hard labour for you,” Rozov said in a telephone interview from outside Tel Aviv.
Using this process, it will complete a load “in minutes,” he said.
Via a crowdfunding campaign on its website, Rozov’s company has taken in about 8,000 deposits of US$ 85, each granting the customer a 10 per cent discount off the final product, which has a target price of US$ 850, he said. The company aims to open pre- orders by the end of the year and to start deliveries at the end of 2018.
While the modern laundry room is generally built to contain a separate washer and dryer, Whirlpool’s market research has found that many consumers will be interested in buying two washer/dryer hybrids and standing them side by side to increase capacity and to reduce time spent on the chore, Whah said.
Last year, about 17 million washers and dryers were sold in the United States, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. Sakane projected that Laundroid sales could reach 20 million units a year worldwide.
Perhaps. But as Whah noted, consumers still consider the core benefit of laundry to be “getting your clothes clean in the washer and dry in the dryer.”
Annalee Newitz, a technology writer, wondered in a phone interview if Laundroid would eventually become like a bread machine: an oft-gifted, rarely used appliance.