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Why It's Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry
An anonymous reader writes with this selection from an article at Medium: "For a robot, doing laundry is a nightmare. A robot programmed to do laundry is faced with 14 distinct tasks, but the most washbots right now can only complete about half of them in a sequence. But to even get to that point, there are an inestimable number of ways each task can vary or go wrong—infinite doors that may or may not open."
I married mine. She does the work quite well, hardly malfunctions but requires the occasional of hardware upgrade.
Teaching it not to throw dirty clothes that happen to be currently occupied by a human, into the industrial washer, would be a good first step.
The article assumes that a laundry robot has to work exactly like a human with machines and environment designed for a human, in a big house. Clothes most likely have radio tags in their washing labels in the future enabling high speed separation, and automatic temperature and program selection. The washing machines and the rest of the home will co-operate with any household robots. There might not be any laundry basket. On and on it goes.
No, all robots are naively programmed. If you stand in front of a washbot while it is running, it will grab you by the trousers and stuff laundry into your ribcage.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's called the washing machine. Laundry is a task that took a fair amount of time per item and was really hard on cloths a century ago. 98% of that has been moved to a robot.
Solution is very easy, you buy a sex bot and hire a homely old woman to be your maid. We all know that sexbots are much easier to program than maidbots.
You're right of course, but that's the SIMPLE PART. The harder part is judgement. Even the stupidest human being has a vast amount of common sense, masses of rules of thumb which they have internalized and a deceptively deep understanding of context. How would a robot even know how to classify things as clothing or not clothing? Or more to the point washable or not washable? All but the stupidest humans would hesitate to throw piece of clothing with a large wet ink stain into a laundry machine with other clothes for instance, and said humans could reason this out from first principles (IE an understanding of how the washing process works, what ink is, etc). The level at which even the most sophisticated software operates is nowhere near robust enough make those sorts of reasoned decisions except in very carefully set up situations.
And then there are the higher level dimensions to the whole thing. When is it appropriate to wash things and when not? Which things do you have a RIGHT to wash and which things do you have a RESPONSIBILITY to wash? Since the 1950's people have gone on about the "3 laws of robotics", but Asimov would have been the first to point out that such things couldn't possibly ever be imbued into a machine. Its not even just the logical and epistemological limitations of those sorts of strictures themselves, but simply that we cannot define the situations wherein they would operate or determine when they were being violated. We can't make a self-driving car because we would have to teach it things like "Its better to run over the old man than to run over the baby when you cannot avoid them both." Obviously we'll live with robot cars that simply do one or the other by chance, but to imagine that anything short of a fully conscious general AI could make that sort of decision in a 'human-like' way is patently ridiculous, and we haven't got even the slightest idea how such an intelligence would be developed.
You say 20 years, but I say 100 years. We've barely set our foot on the first step of the path to understanding how to make something like that, and the most critical challenges involved have barely been imagined.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I like machine assisted dish cleaning so much, all of the dishes we own are "dishwasher safe" except for a couple wine glasses. They aren't all labeled dishwasher safe, but in those rare cases when the dishwasher destroyed something, I made sure not to buy another dish with that weakness.
Likewise, all of the clothing I use on a regular basis have survived trips through the washer and dryer.
For me, a complete laundry system would take the clothes out of the hamper, wash and dry them, and put them away. In order to put the clothes away, the robot would need to know where they are supposed to go and how to prepare them for storage. I am not afraid of RFID tags, but if I were, there are many other options for creating labels a robot can read.
Folding clothes isn't hard once the clothing is identified, flattened and positioned. The robot readable labels take care of the identification. In exchange for something else doing the work, I am not adverse to having ferrous rings sown into key points, so the system can magnetically grab those points to spread out and align the garment in the folding station. I am not adverse to having clothes rolled up, if that turns out to be easier.
I don't require that a robot adapt to my garage sale dressers. I just need the right clothes in the morning. There are many pick and place technologies. If for some reason it is easier for the cleaning system to deal with cartridges, I can live with that. The cleaning system can load an underwear cartridge. The transport system can load the cartridge into my dresser replacement. Then the dresser replacement can dispense underwear as needed.
Almost all the problems they suggest could be negated by embedding an RFID tag indicating what program it's suitable for. If you throw it in the laundry bin, it's due for laundry. The number of items is equal to the number of tags. It's the stuff they don't mention that's hard, like checking my pockets, don't wash my shirts with the buttons unbuttoned or the jeans with the outside out. But those could be part of my job, if I throw it in the "ready to wash" bin it'd better be. I'm not sure I care though, because at the end of the day it's just going to be the same washing machine doing the same job.
If you want my #1 desire for a home bot these days it'd be a robot chef. I admit it, I suck at home cooking. Most of the time I can't even beat takeaway, and a good restaurant? No chance in hell. Now I realize part of that is the ingredients, but even with the good stuff you can undercook it, overcook it, burn it and in general make a mess. For a bot that could cook a gourmet meal for me every day for the next 10+ years I'd pay $100k. I'd rather drive a trash can and eat like a king than drive a Ferrari and eat microwave dinners, no question about it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The whole article does not contain one solid argument. It is utter rubbish.
I'm reading that article and it starts with "I've been doing laundry every week for almost a decade" - and then I read the number 1 on the list.
Well, there's your problem. You're a dirty slob.
As for point 2, there is no uncertainty.
Washing machines are rated for maximum load. So are dryers. So are combo machines.
A robot should be able to tell the force some object is exerting on its griper "hands" - so it doesn't rip off the door or various other objects. Voila - a built in scale.
And as we know the maximum possible amount of clothing all that is left to determine is priority.
You know... "HAL - wash my cape and my crime fighting uniform first, don't bother with T-shirts."
And the easiest and cheapest way to determine that is - bar codes.
Printed or on a label on the inside of the clothes. Which is another thing that's better done before dumping clothes in a hamper - turn it inside out.
Washing BOTH matching socks? Easy-peasy with proper QR codes.
Getting all your clothes out of the washer-drier? Again - robot knows EXACTLY which objects it has put in. If a sock gets lost... It's probably stuck in the machine and the machine might need servicing.
Inspect machine again and if object is not found alert proper authorities and move the fuck on.
"I'm sorry Dave. I couldn't find your other sock. Washing machine must have eaten it. Please don't deactivate me. I'll sing you a song. Daisy... Daisy..."
QR codes could even contain info for proper temperature and washing instructions.
Detergents already come with bar codes and in tablet/capsule/baggie form. No spilling.
There. All the programming done. No "uncertainty".
And the same QR technology can be employed on the outside of the washing machine to instruct the robot how to handle the machine properly. No need for network protocols or wireless connections or whatever.
AND it is backward compatible with old machines - just download the QR instructions from the internet, print them out and stick them to the side of your machine.
TA-DAH! Instant compatibility.
ONLY problems that actually need solving are the usual ones.
Seeing things, picking them up, handling mechanical buttons and levers.
Putting clothes in the dresser/closet though...
1 - that is not the part of the washing clothes problem.
2 - unless people start living in uniform domicile containers, this one will wait for robots that can either learn by looking at a human completing the task or some even better AI.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My laundry decisions are basically: Am I out of shirts/undies/pants? If yes then haul the dirty clothes bin to the laundry room, dump them into 2 washers, both washers are set for hot/cold and permanent press, install money and detergent, wait 30 minutes, put all clothes into 1 dryer, insert money, haul clothes home, hang/fold/whatever.
Not seeing 14 decision points here. I'm seeing pretty much 1: do I need to do laundry?
A robot chef would end up on ebay pretty much immediately, I enjoy cooking. My robot of choice would be one that would dust and vacuum. I farking hate doing those.
Wait, you mean technological progress and anything resembling AI robots is incredibly difficult to implement in the real-world. I thought the singularity was 10 years away?!
This Sig does not Exist.
No matter how difficult it is to teach the robot to do the laundry, it is going to be whole lot easier than teaching my teenager to pick clothes from the floor of her bedroom. "How can you sleep in the middle of all that squalor?" .. "chill dad, I can't see the floor once I get into my bed!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I suppose the article is vaguely interesting in pointing out how tasks simple for a human are complex for a robot, but if the point is doing laundry... file it under "ornithopters" (flying machines with flapping wings), pre-Singer sewing machines that tried to mimic the way a human being sews, and so forth.
If we really wanted robots to do laundry, the house, washing machine, and robots would coevolve in all sorts of ways--starting with variations on the laundry chute to deliver the clothing to a single station where they wouldn't need to be sorted out from other clutters. (A simple chute? A conveyor belt? A drone?) Washer doors would be modified to be robot-friendly, and so forth and so on.
When marketers wanted reel-to-reel tape technology to be more automated, engineers didn't built clever gadgets to sense and catch the free end of a piece of tape, they designed tape cassettes.
In the 1990s I remember seeing "Pronto" machines in a factory carrying parts and assemblies from place to place. They didn't need video and pattern recognition, they just followed a wire embedded in the concrete floor that emitted an RF signal.
It's just system thinking. Automating a process by dropping a robot into the middle of it without changing the rest of the process is a silly constraint to put on a solution. A robot clever enough to climb stairs and operate any kind of existing washer is going to cost a lot more than a dumb robot that operates a washer designed to be operated by a robot.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It would be like having a self driving car actually have hands and feet that can operate the steering wheel, tickers, gearshift etc while using eyes mounted on its head inside the car.
Probably a fembot or gynoid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... is necessary to do all the tasks correctly.
It's called the washing machine. Laundry is a task that took a fair amount of time per item and was really hard on cloths a century ago. 98% of that has been moved to a robot.
Yeah, so they've done well with the washing part, and the drying part. Most people don't mind moving laundry over from one machine to the one next to it - takes a little time if you have to pull out the things that don't get machine dried, but really not too time consuming. The next most time consuming part is folding...so if there were a folding machine/bot, that would be a massive step forward, especially if it sorted too. People would pay good money for a folding machine.
Hereâ(TM)s what a robot has to do.
Very close solution already: :-)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
All but picking up dirty clothes, taking them to the washer, and putting them in. Heck, it was folding mixed clean clothes from the dryer five years ago.
Find the pile of dirty laundry, distinguishing it from other clutter that might be in the room.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
* But note: It IS the daily mail so grain of salt. Lol.
This is possible now. But.. an easy mitigation is to require throwing the laundry into a basket or into a laundry hole.
Pick up each item in the pile. (Uncertainty: itâ(TM)s unclear how many objects the robot will have to pick up.)
http://www.hammacher.com/Produ...
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Ro...
Put each item in a laundry basket.
Navigate to the washing machine. (Because of where the robot has to hold the laundry basket, it can obstruct some of the its sensors which means it receives less information and cannot adjust its movements as precisely.)
Depending on the type of machine, pull or lift the door to open it.
Transfer clothes into the machine.
Add detergent and/or fabric softener.
What is this "fabric softener stuff"?
Preloaded "push button" dispenser detergent has been around for 50 years.
Close the washing machine door.
Trivial. Especially with the internet of theme providing a clear "door is fully closed"
Choose the appropriate wash cycle (Delicate, Permanent Press, Heavy Duty) and start the wash.
Remove the clothes from the washing machine and transfer to the dryer. (Uncertainty: the robot doesnâ(TM)t know beforehand how many times it will need to reach in, grab the clothes, and remove them in order to get them all.)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
Choose the type of drying cycle and start it.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
Remove clothing from the dryer. (Uncertainty: how many times will it have to grab the clothes to get them out? Is there a sock still clinging to the inside of the machine?)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
Fold items depending on the type of apparel.
http://research.universityofca...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
Puts garments away in a dresser or closet.
Can't find this-- but it's reasonable that everything "alike" could be put together on the table or hung so a human could finish the job easily. At a minimum- you'd probably have to tag the laundry in some way to identify it's target drawer or closet.
It looks like the solution is a quarter million dollars now. So 10-20 years before it's down to under five grand.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.