alt Hacker NewsOf all the tasks I do, folding clothes takes a ridiculously small slice of my time. Is this and all the other robotics videos aimed at H&M staff?
Replies
As a parent with 3 kids and both my wife and I working, folding clothes is the most tedious household chore. It's physically and mentally exhausting (unlike doing the dishes, which is only physically exhausting as I can wash piles of dishes while zoning out). And not to mention take so much time, a week's worth of unfolded pile of clothes for our entire household can take me 1-2 hours to fold uninterrupted (2-3 hours if I do it while watching Netflix or something).
Sorting and folding laundry is one of the most tedious chores in our household. Do you have kids?
Come back when you have a family and you run a washing machine full of clothes per day.
I think its a ubiquitous task which requires some amount of precision dexterity, so its an easy to digest example.
A lot of smaller chores look trivial when considered in isolation, but have disproportionate time and mental cost because of how they fit in the flow of life. Sometimes the effect is similar to interrupting an engineer for a couple of minutes.
Funny you mentioned H&M. They are boycotted on China due to their public stance against slave labour:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57691415
It is important to remember that China is not only about open weight LLMs, fastest cars and flying taxis. There is still a lot of very serious human right abuse going on in this country.
It's one of the most annoying.
I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler.
But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc.
I have a pile of washed clothes that moves from the bed to the chair for a good week before it finally goes into the closet.
It's meant for war. Today it folds your clothes, tomorrow it plants mines and shoots at you on a battlefield.
They're trying to show their investors a butler robot that can do all types of household chores.
Folding fabric has traditionally been very hard to solve with robots; the ideal places to grab the fabric might be hidden, the fabric patterns are repetitive, and the material flops around, tangles in the grippers, and brings other pieces of laundry with it.
Successfully sorting and folding a basket of laundry shows they've got a control system capable of performing some quite difficult tasks.