Laundroid Is A Robot That Uses AI To Sort And Neatly Fold Your Clothes For Just Rs 10 Lakh
The main reason the tech industry is so hell-bent on building robots is because they know how well they’ll sell. After all, wouldn’t you offload all the household chores on a machine if you could? Convenience FTW!
That’s why engineers at Tokyo-based Seven Dreamers decided the world needed a robot just to sort and fold your laundry. They call it the Laundroid.
The Laundroid began development way back in 2005, and it finally made its way to CES 2018 earlier this month. The basic idea is to make the entire process as smooth and worry-free as possible; you drop your clean, dry clothes into the collection box, and several hours later pick out the piles of sorted and folded laundry, ready to put away.
Laundroid has multiple robotic arms to pick up the clothes you drop in, which it then scans using built-in cameras. It’s connects to the company’s server over Wi-Fi, in order to use their custom artificial intelligence to analyse the clothing. It then compares it to a neural network database of over 256,000 images of clothing of different types and colours. Once that’s done, Laundroid can decide how to manipulate the robot arms in order to fold the article of clothing it’s holding the best way.
Unfortunately, as cool as it is to have this entire process automated, you’re going to have to be ready to wait a few hours for the bot to finish the chore. After all, it takes about five to ten minutes just to fold a single T-shirt.
It’s not so much that Laundroid can fold clothes, but how it achieves this that’s important. The AI gathers analyses all kinds of data like the type, size, and colour of the piece of clothing. A synchronised app will even keep track of all the clothing processed by Laundroid, and let you set categories for them by family member etc.
Of course, it’s important to note that Laundroid has a ridiculous $16,000 price tag for something you can do faster by hand. However, the company hopes to bring the price down eventually to under $2000. In the meantime, hopefully it’ll get a little faster too.