Take a load off. The robots that fold laundry are coming
Cars can now drive themselves. Mobile phones 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 analysing 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 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 mashup of a clothesline and a plastic oven.
A working prototype of Laundroid — backed by about $90 million in investment capital, including funds from George Roberts and Henry Kravis of the buyout firm KKR & Co LP — 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.
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.com 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 US 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, where a thinking machine lends a genuinely useful metallic hand with the chores.
“There are a few pop culture holy grails out there, the maid robot being one of them,” said Daniel Wilson, a researcher in robotics and an author whose books include Where’s My Jetpack? and the novel Robopocalypse.
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 recognises if this is a T-shirt or pants or pajamas,” 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 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,” 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,” he said. “Using this process, it will complete a load in minutes.’’
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% discount off the final product, which has a target price of $850.
It aims to open pre-orders by the end of the year and to start deliveries at the end of 2018.