Robots take over . . . folding the laundry
At least two companies are promising household help by the end of 2017
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 laundry-folding 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 drawer-ready stack of smoothly folded clothes.
Laundroid is slightly smaller than a typical refrigera- tor 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 $90 million (U.S.) 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 $16,000.
Seven Dreamers, the company introducing Laundroid, aims to bring the cost down to $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 the iBasket, a laundry hamper that automatically washes clothes when full; EcoWasher, promising “detergent-free laundry”; and DashLocker, an app-based urban laundry service.
The Whirlpool Corp., owner of the Maytag brand, is also aggressively tinkering. The company plans to introduce in January an all-in-one $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.
“There is a high level of excitement around innovating in laundry,” said Danielle Whah, Whirlpool’s North America product director for laundry.
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 washing, vacuuming and caffeinating experience. But they do seem to be a crucial advance for in-home automation.
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 Tshirt or pants or pyjamas,” Shin Sa- kane, 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 item sometimes by the edge, sometimes by a midpoint, “there will be no times that a garment will be picked up in the same shape,” said Guy Hayazaki, a Laundroid spokesperson.
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, folding each according to its needs and sorting them into separate piles for members of the household.
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 $85, each granting the customer a 10-per-cent discount off the final product, which has a target price of $850, he said. The company aims to open preorders by the end of the year and to start deliveries at the end of 2018.
Hugh Howey, a science fiction writer, said in an email: “What I hope to see is a future where all our hours are filled not with mandatory drudgery needed to sustain our finances but freely chosen tasks which sustain our souls.”
It’s an attractive future.