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Panasonic Invests $60 Million In World's First Laundry-Folding Robot (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Telegraph.co.uk: Panasonic has invested tens of millions of dollars in a robot that can reduce the time it takes to wash clothes by sorting clean items and folding them into neat piles. The electronics giant will pour $60 million into the startup behind the folding robot called Laundroid, which was first unveiled in October last year. The domestic robot has been a decade in the making and is expected to finally be available to buy next year. Created by Japanese company Seven Dreamers, the Laundroid can fold a shirt in ten minutes and sort clothing into types.
Seven Dreamers is yet to say how much the robot, which is around the same size as a fridge-freezer, will cost, but Panasonic is reportedly funding just 10pc of the project. Consumers place clothes in a drawer at the bottom of the Laundroid, which it then identifies, sorts and folds using a combination of image recognition software, advanced robotics and machine learning. It can fold a range of clothing items, including shirts, skirts, shorts and trousers, according to Seven Dreamers. The company plans to release the Laundroid in March 2017, and will unveil more details at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Seven Dreamers is yet to say how much the robot, which is around the same size as a fridge-freezer, will cost, but Panasonic is reportedly funding just 10pc of the project. Consumers place clothes in a drawer at the bottom of the Laundroid, which it then identifies, sorts and folds using a combination of image recognition software, advanced robotics and machine learning. It can fold a range of clothing items, including shirts, skirts, shorts and trousers, according to Seven Dreamers. The company plans to release the Laundroid in March 2017, and will unveil more details at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Does it mean a load of shirts? Haha my kids can fold a shirt in 10 minutes.. Including the time spent convincing them
My Mom will do it for half that!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I had a business selling laundry robots but it folded :(
1. Put your shirts on hangers
2. Buy a bunch of the same kind of socks and just throw them all in a drawer
3. Pile underwear into a drawer flat
4. Only have to fold pants and shorts, and that's quick and easy
5. Way cheaper than this thing will probly be...
Am I doing it wrong if I just throw all my clean clothes in a basket and place them in my wardrobe until needed?
I guess selling to the wealthy, but really if you have that much money loading and unloading the thing would be beneath you anyway. And why spend money to make the hired helps lives easier ?.
I mean, I process an entire load of laundry in less than the time it takes this to fold a shirt, really ?.
Nobody sees them, so why bother?
My Aunt used to iron and fold everything she washed, including underwear and socks.
I asked her why she spent 4 or 5 hours ironing every Sunday, and she seemed to think it was the proper thing to do.
She was a lovely lady, and other than the weird laundry thing, very normal.
I've invented a robot that separates clean clothes and dirty ones and shreds them into neat piles. You can buy the licence on a piece-produced basis.
Folding is easy!
.. for a primate. try getting a robot to do it. no, that shirt's left sleeve is inside-out - straighten it first.. okay, now the whole thing is inside-out. stupid robot! can't you even detect when a complex three-dimensional shape made of a deformable material has been partly inverted?
how about we get the first poster's kids and put them in a box? they can fold clothes forever and we don't even have to program them to do it.
you might need to replace them when they starve.
I want to go stand a platform and get scanned by a 3D scanner, chose my options on a touch screen, come back in 30 minutes and have clothes that fit made by a robot.
Substitute "tailor" for "robot" and there's an entire district of Hong Kong where you can get this done.
I was a consultant for Panasonic in Japan about 20 years ago and I can tell you that after Matsushita Konosuke (the founder) died, it has been run by idiots.
I was doing a walk through at a (now bankrupt) subsidiary that was the darling of the company at the time. I asked about trading data backup between locations in western Japan, since all of their designs and corporate history was on PCs. The vice president I was with was perplexed by the question. I asked an engineer beside us at his desk about back up, and he smugly pulled a CD-R out of his desk drawer and showed it to me with a smile.
I took the CD, then the lighter on his desk and started melting it.
Anyway, I remember the spirited discussions as they said the "Internet Refrigerator" was going to be the hit product for a decade. A housewife would look in the refrigerator, them make a shopping list on the computer built into the door of the refrigerator, then keep the list on the internet because it was the internet!
I was a heretic who said it would never replace the paper, pencil and magnet. They spent GDP of small nation on that piece of crap.
That engineer is probably a top executive now...
then I reckon it can tell whether a given article of clothing is in folded condition. So, they could make a much more valuable robot - one that goes around, picks up all the clothing that isn't folded and brings it to the laundry. Next task: clothing recognition - being able to pull an article of clothing from the dryer and return it to the room from which it was originally collected.
I enjoy folding my clothes and putting them away. Especially the ones I carefully selected and thus like very much.
It's one of those many simple household tasks that have a deep zen-like vibe to it if you put yourself it in the right mood and attempt to keep a household leaning towards minimalism. Pure bliss. And no, I'm not joking.
Same with manual dishwashing. I have a set of small wooden japanee soup bowls I use for tea, soup, cereal and everything else that requires small bowls. Washing them by hand is a pure pleasure. Something some rich dude who can afford a massive, complex, space-wasting laundry folding bot would actually pay money for to do on some relaxing zen-retreat or some non-sense the super-rich need to chill out from chasing all that money. I would cringe if anyone would put a bowl like that into a dishwasher. And I'd then probably hit him.
This bot is something straight of of that "Brasil" movie. I only see a place for something like this in a hotel or so - where massive amounts of laundry have to be folded by a certain standard. And fast. For private households this is utter non-sense and a waste of resources and a burden on the environment. If you are so freakin rich and have tons of linen for your 30-bedroom villa then get personell to do your laundry just like any other self-respecting super-rich person.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is the sign of things to come.
A machine that can identify and sort clothes may have limited use by itself, but just think of what is involved in making it. Not easy at all. Tomorrows machine will be able to pick up the clothes from the kids floor, put them in the washing machine, hang them out to dry (I'm not American), and then iron them and fold them. And it will only cost $1,000. That is a machine that will sell once it can also make the bed and vacuum the floor.
Now put that machine in a hotel and what happens to the army of cleaners?
Anthony
They should spend sometime viewing youtube, I saw this being done many years ago.
So it's not like it's being kept as some big secret https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"What is my purpose?"
"You fold shirts"
"Oh My God."
why spend money to make the hired helps lives easier ?
Yeah, and what's with all those washers and dryers? The staff can do that too!
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
How do they get into the washing machine in the first place (with the correct cycle) and then into the dryer (at the correct temperature) in the first place?
My Mom has been asking me that same question for the past 25 years, but I still haven't figured out the answer. As far as I am concerned, it is magic. I leave my clothes on the bathroom floor, and the next evening they have appeared in my bedroom drawer, all without me needing to leave the basement.
May I recommend a thermostatic mixing valve? It lets you keep your water heater very hot, but delivers the hot water mixed with cold water at the set point of the valve. You can then run a separate pipe from the water heater to appliances that need the very hot water, such as the dishwasher or washing machine. It also delivers more water than a regular water heater set to a safer temperature like 120F, effectively extending the capacity of a water heater by 20% or more.
I wouldn't recommend you plumb the very hot water directly to the tub, as the risk of scalding would be too great.
John
Don't be silly, he's clearly not using Celcius as his temperature scale.
Must admit though, wouldn't fancy a 100K bath myself.