
AI-powered laundry-folding robot company has filed for bankruptcy - prostoalex
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512529/laundroid-laundry-folding-robot-seven-dreamers-bankrupt-ces
======
peter303
You have to admit the washing machine is one of wonders of the modern world,
yet taken for granted. Until they were invented, a wife or servant essentially
devoted most of a whole weekday to washing clothes. A washing machine and
dryer cuts this to a couple hours a week. Clever people seek to cut this time
even further.

~~~
DanBC
But it turns out that washing machines didn't do much to save time. In the
past people just didn't wash their clothes as often. Now people will wash
their clothes after a single wear, and it's still mostly women who are doing
the washing in families.

[https://twitter.com/TimHarford/status/1113123861602713600](https://twitter.com/TimHarford/status/1113123861602713600)

[https://twitter.com/DeconinckKoen/status/1054097445351776256](https://twitter.com/DeconinckKoen/status/1054097445351776256)

~~~
return1
"washing" is a euphemism for pressing a button, though

~~~
tropdrop
This is a gross oversimplification, especially washing in a family (> 1
person).

1\. Sorting - when you buy clothing, do you take handling instructions into
account? Accounting for handling is very hard! Good luck shopping online,
hunting through instruction tags hidden on sides of clothes, all while keeping
price reasonable. I do not like shopping, so I choose the first thing that
looks ok and is comfortable - I am often left with unpleasant surprises when
laundering. Some dryclean only, some handwash-only, some fine with washing but
no dryer, some with dryer ok but tumble-dry only.

2\. Do you have an in-unit washer? I do not - I traverse 7 flights of stairs
to communal apartment laundry room.

3\. Do you need to use quarters for the machine? If yes, this takes an extra
trip to bank beforehand.

4\. 7 flights of stairs again to transfer _some_ of the clothes to a dryer,
others ...

5\. ... Need to be line-dried and hung, somewhere.

6\. Finally, the clothes that could be normally washed must be folded and put
away, not stuffed into a drawer (even simple t-shirts get wrinkled this way).

"washing" is _not_ just pressing a button.

~~~
korm
Step 1 becomes progressively easier after each wash. Steps 2, 3, 4 are
completely eliminated by having an in-unit washer as you said, like most
families in western Europe do at least. Step 6 is also pretty quick with
practice.

~~~
organsnyder
Step 6 is quick for a couple of adults. Add in kids, though, and takes an
order of magnitude longer—especially when the kids are both young enough to be
going through multiple outfits per day and are asleep (thereby restricting the
ability to put clothes away) during the best times to do chores.

------
sytelus
Folding arbitrary pile of laundry completely unsupervised is super hard
problem. I actually have more faith in solving self-driving before that :). It
seems company was Japanese, used loan model (as opposed to VC funding) and
went bankrupt probably because creditors went after them. Their machine cost
$16,000. The article describes scenario at CES where someone tried giving it
black t-shirt but apparently machine couldn't see it and got jammed! It also
occurs to me that many people hang their cloth with hangers in closet instead
of folding. Business proposition seems to be bit limited.

~~~
oliwarner
> Folding arbitrary pile of laundry completely unsupervised is super hard
> _computing and robotics_ problem

FTFY. And the business proposition isn't "limited", it's stupid. An attempt to
throw technology somewhere it _cannot_ compete.

The opportunity cost for that $16k is paying somebody minimum wage to fold
clothes for you for over 2000 hours. That would last a family of four about
_38 years_ (just folding). Cleaners, housekeepers, nannies, etc all offer this
sort of service, and more. Cleaning, ironing, folding, putting away and
because of the lack of skills, and the availability of people to do it, they
usually can't charge that much for it.

This robot took up a ton of space, barely worked by all accounts, did untold
damage to clothes that got caught, and didn't do any other part of the cycle.
I don't know how you can call that a proposition. It's neat but it's not
saleable.

~~~
bluGill
This version. It isn't ready yet. If they do a $2k robot that finds my dirty
clothing on the floor and puts clean clothing in the correct closet/draws (my
kids, wife, and mine...) and I'm interested. Laundry takes a lot of time, and
paying someone isn't really cost effective.

~~~
oliwarner
I'll start positively, by agreeing. Yes, if you can make a robot for $2k that
does all that, cooks and cleans, perhaps teaches the kids to ride their bikes,
dispenses oral sex, etc, again yes, they will sell and sell _fast_. But that's
really a very significant distance from what we have, which is a constellation
of very expensive robots that are demonstrably worse than humans at doing
tasks unskilled humans are pretty good at.

Even at the most basic level, a vacuum cleaner... It wasn't until last year
that there was a self-emptying model. It still insanely slow. It's suction is
still objectively awful. It still gets blocked up by anything hairier than a
large cat. It still can't get into certain places. But that's going to be
$1000 and you're still going to have to set it up, fix is when it breaks, etc.

A $200 stick vacuum and 10 minutes/week cumulative contact is much better.
That $800 saved could pay for somebody to do that vacuuming (and more!) for
you for 100 hours. Really, tell me what's more "cost effective".

But yes, if we somehow get a magical level of robot that can transcend stairs
on their own, carry 20KG of washing up and down, fold it all up, put it
away... That would be worth $2k. But that's just a robotic unicorn at this
juncture.

~~~
mschuster91
8$/h for vacuuming? No way unless you're abusing illegal immigrants.

~~~
oliwarner
Minimum wage for cleaners is standard _here_ , but whether or not that tallies
with your experience will probably depend on the cost of living where you are.

------
netcan
Lets remember that failure is an expected part of the game. Most ambitious
product r&d projects fail quitely, inside big companies. Folding laundry is a
famously hard problem.

Lets also remember that _I_ really want a wardrobe that takes my dirty clothes
and restocks itself with clean clothes.

~~~
dmix
I remember reading long ago that something like 70-90% of new startups are
dead by the 7th year. It's not that big of a deal.

Edit: Small business rates are a bit better as startups require a bit more
than just some revenue but some growth metrics. VC-backed companies fail at a
pretty high rate (75% fail to return). [https://fitsmallbusiness.com/small-
business-failure-rates/](https://fitsmallbusiness.com/small-business-failure-
rates/)

------
islon
While a "AI-powered laundry-folding robot" company files for bankruptcy
there's a guy making money selling onions on the internet.

~~~
d--b
The guy selling onions on the internet is not make a ton of money from it,
though.

~~~
eropple
So?

A more useful question is whether he makes _enough_.

Growth-at-all-costs is toxic.

~~~
mdorazio
I really want to see his financials. He said that an unexpected $10K cost
nearly ended the business and I got the sense from the article the margins are
fairly slim after factoring everything in.

~~~
andrewnc
AFAIK that was at the very beginning of the venture, maybe financials are more
stable now.

------
misterman0
I sometimes hold off washing my clothes for so long I end up wearing the same
underwear two days in a row, then no underwear and very dirty socks, then no
socks before I realize it's time to wind up the old washing machine. That's
how much I hate washing. I wear every piece of clothing I have and at the end
of a two month long washiless period I go to work looking a fool. And then
after gaving washed my clothes I now have three hundred pair of socks to
match! Nightmare!

SV, please try harder at creating a washing assistant. I need it yesterday!

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
Buy the same socks in batches. If they are all the same color/shade you won’t
need to spend time matching socks. Dump them into a drawer, and every time you
need two socks, you grab two, done.

You could also extend the not-washing period if you buy more clothes. The more
you have, the longer until you run out of clothes to wear.

~~~
fifnir
I thought i was doing this by only getting black socks. Now I have a drawer
full of very subtly different black socks

~~~
bunderbunder
Just lean into this one and buy brightly colored and patterned socks instead.

That way, you're obviously always wearing mismatched socks, and it becomes an
obviously deliberate (if eccentric) fashion choice instead of a repeated
sartorial goof-up.

Also, you get to wear socks that are more fun.

~~~
misterman0
This is a very useful hack. I'm gonna try it out.

Socks didn't use to be a fashion statement but they sort of are now. Mixed
socks. Because, y'know, I don't care. I just don't care. I'm just me.

LOL, so corny. I'm not sure anymore that I'll be able to pull of mixed socks.

------
L_226
I feel like folding clothes in an approximately rectangular shape is the wrong
approach. Rolling clothes into cylinders is potentially easier to design for,
and it is pretty effective for storage too.

~~~
defterGoose
I recently started using Marie Kondo's method and I was thinking the same
thing. Some combination of rollers and a big ducted fan/tube to blow air into
the shirt beforehand. Maybe we should have a go at it. What are you doing this
Saturday? ;)

~~~
L_226
I'm flying to Italy (un)fortunately... But I am actually interested in
exploring this if you are ever in Berlin.

------
sonnyblarney
Joking aside, a truly admirable goal. My god it would help everyone alive.

~~~
clothes
I don't fold my clothes, and haven't in 20 years.

Which is to say, my clothes do not get folded by anyone. No one folde them for
me, nor do I fold them myself.

You don't have to fold most clothing. You can just toss it all in a basket and
let it be. Most cotton wrinkles will disappear after being worn for about 20
minutes. Movement, body heat and ambient humidity removes wrinkles
automatically from a lot of clothing. So, basically wrinkles from the drier
usually don't last beyond most morning commutes.

And then, of course, there's not giving a single fuck about useless minutia,
like... fucking wrinkled clothes.

~~~
codegladiator
Wearing ironed clothes makes me feel much better compared to wearing wrinkled
clothes. Sometimes the difference could be as huge as between a good day and
bad day. So maybe luxury but not useless.

~~~
Gibbon1
On the other hand, cotton clothes will make you look like a slob if they
aren't ironed.

------
Swizec
At last modern fabrics don't require ironing anymore. You can put away a
dryer's worth of clothes in less time than it takes to watch a quarter of an
episode of Game of Thrones. It's really not that hard (for a human)

Industrial scale though ... but can AI really be cheaper than a skilled
minimum wage professional? You know someone who has folded thousands of
t-shirts and really gotten it down to an impressive speed.

Like this guy for example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzivmWS6qak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzivmWS6qak)
He folds a button-down shirt in 30 seconds. That's 120 shirts an hour ...

~~~
jfk13
> At last modern fabrics don't require ironing anymore.

Would those "modern fabrics" be the ones using synthetic fibres that
contribute thousands of plastic microparticles to the water each time they go
through the wash?

~~~
DanBC
I guess GP is talking about "poly cotton blends" rather than pure polyester or
acrylic. But yes, poly-cotton blends do release microplastics.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/27/washing-
clot...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/27/washing-clothes-
releases-water-polluting-fibres-study-finds)

> They found that acrylic was the worst offender, releasing nearly 730,000
> tiny synthetic particles per wash, five times more than polyester-cotton
> blend fabric, and nearly 1.5 times as many as polyester.

People have no idea how many fibres are released per kg of clothing. It can be
a surprising amount.

[https://www.naturvardsverket.se/Documents/publ-
kompl/1003-10...](https://www.naturvardsverket.se/Documents/publ-
kompl/1003-10%20Report%20Microplastics%20from%20industrial%20laundries.pdf)

> From the results from the measurements, calculations were made to estimate
> the number of released microplastic particles. The release varied
> significantly between the different laundries. If the calculations were
> based on an assumed best-case scenario, between 5 000 and 4 550 000 of
> microplastic particles were released per kg of washed textile. If a worst-
> case scenario was assumed, between 15 000 and 5 375 000 microplastic
> particles were released per kg of washed textile.

~~~
telchar
This is very noticeable if you watch someone wash a fuzzy blanket bought from
Walmart. It seems like half the blanket goes down the drain after the first
wash.

------
Animats
Nice. There's a market for this technology in the sewing and commercial
laundry industries. Fabric handling is a tough robotics problem, and progress
is welcome. But for that, it will have to really work, every time.

~~~
JohnFen
...and it will have to work a lot faster than these machines.

------
JohnFen
Even priced at $2,000, it would have been hard to justify for home use.

Folding laundry just isn't that hard or time-consuming. The one situation
where I could see such a machine being justifiable is if you have a _lot_ of
laundry to fold -- but the speed of the device would seem to rule it out as a
solution for that use case.

------
mrfusion
Would it be easier to invent wrinkle free clothes than this robot?

~~~
lazyjones
Definitely... And much more useful, too.

------
sauravt
Someone should make a solar powered washing machine that runs off the grid and
doesn't need to be fed with a water supply (recycles its own water usage, use
UV beams to kill germs) Only external inputs are detergant and sunlight,
output is dirt and heat.

~~~
pjc50
Why? Why have its own compact set of expensive recycling infrastructure and
storage when you have the grid for that?

~~~
glenneroo
Recycling the water would actually be beneficial for our oceans[0].

[0]: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/18513393/avengers-
endgame...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/18513393/avengers-endgame-no-
post-credits-scene-mcu-marvel-cinematic-universe)

------
perfunctory
I like the ending

"It’s sad news for everyone involved, but maybe we don’t need an expensive Wi-
Fi-connected machine to do our simple chores for us. After all, now we have
Marie Kondo to teach us how to fold fitted sheets."

~~~
gourou
Marie Kondo's folding method is not the common way of doing it, the 3-way
folding is not easy to master at first.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpc5_1896ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpc5_1896ro)

But yeah, 8 million views already.

~~~
JohnFen
I think I am congenitally unable to fold fitted sheets. I've tried every
method I could find. In the end, I just decided to no longer use fitted
sheets.

------
nmstoker
Why start with consumers?

Surely there are narrower goals to go for first (eg retail), nail them and
then expand into consumer (super wealthy luxury first and work down)

Retail would be much easier to make a case for this: it could be shared across
a whole store, the items would be known and someone could configure it company
wide. Pricing the savings would also be simpler than for consumers, who either
have to want it for their own convenience or have this service offered by
existing on-site competitors mentioned by others already (cleaners,
housekeepers etc)

------
d--b
There's a lot more money in replacing cooks, fruit pickers or amazon workers
than there is in folding clothes.

------
joshfraser
I hate doing laundry. Switching to using a wash and fold service was one of
the best decisions for improving the quality of my life. I pay $40 every
couple weeks to get all my clothes washed and folded. I love robots, but
they're not going to beat inexpensive skilled human labor anytime soon.

------
sizzzzlerz
they thought 5 minutes to fold a shirt, that wasn't black, made for a viable
product?

~~~
sonnyblarney
If you could throw a big bin in the night before and let it run, it could be
viable on some level.

------
return1
btw, the ironing is by far the worst aspect of dealing with laundry. Is
folding even an issue?

~~~
JohnFen
Personally, I rarely need to iron anything. I have some fancy clothes I wear
for fancy occasions, and they require ironing, but I only need them a few
times a year.

The vast majority of my clothing doesn't really need to be ironed (even if
it's not specifically "wrinkle free"). That's one of the criteria I use when I
select my clothes.

------
sixQuarks
the problem with this machine was that you have to setup the clothes properly
within the machine for it to work. That defeats the whole purpose.

If you could just throw in a bunch of dirty clothes and let it do everything,
that's a different story.

------
zeristor
You mean it’s folded?

------
duxup
This fits into the category I saw a reporter describe as "Things 20 something
engineers wish their mom still did for them."

Similar to juicero (spelling), Amazon proposal to deliver packages inside your
house....etc.

~~~
praneshp
> Amazon proposal to deliver packages inside your house

Wasn't this just to prevent assholes from stealing packages from your
yard/door/...?

~~~
sadris
Yes. I believe they shifted to putting it in your car in driveway

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I believe they shifted to putting it in your car in driveway

Huh? How is that supposed to help?

People aren't less likely to steal a package out of your car than out of your
driveway.

~~~
drewmol
Yes they are. Lack of package visibility, unclear accessiblity (vehicle
locks), potential of car alarms, requirement for unlawful entry, increased
likelihood of occupents associated with vehicle presence, expanded threat for
forensic discovery, fear of spontaneous Tesla combustion and vehicle interiors
that smell of soiled diapers and spoiled milk are the biggest deterrents.

~~~
solarkraft
> fear of spontaneous Tesla combustion

heh.

------
GrryDucape
You could say, someone lost their shirt on this one.

~~~
crwalker
I would say ... they folded.

------
chriszeoli93
Can they make an AI robot that files for bankruptcy?

------
peter303
I dread laundry. Its one of signs you are still alive and soiling clothes.

Some males never do laundry their entire lives. Their mothers do it until they
marry. Then their wives and daughters.

~~~
anonytrary
As a single male with extremely few material possessions, I'm one of those
people that does my own laundry but never folds their clothes. I used to watch
my mom fold our clothes when we were little and seemed like a waste of time.
Seeing as I wear extremely casual clothes, this isn't a problem for me. If I
wore more formal clothes, I would fold/hang those. I just leave my clothes in
my basket and pick out what I need every morning. It seems to work well
enough.

~~~
bobbylarrybobby
Aren’t your clothes wrinkled?

~~~
anonytrary
Yes, they are, but that doesn't bother me much and no one has ever commented
on it. Heck, I've even worn shirts inside-out and people barely notice.
They're probably too busy thinking about their own appearances...

~~~
jetrink
People don't comment on it out of politeness, but they do notice. Then,
consciously and unconsciously, they draw negative inferences about you. They
might suspect that you are not well organized or that you are lazy. You are
free to be unbothered by that fact, but their reaction to your appearance is
outside your control. It is a slight headwind in your life that makes your
interactions with people more difficult than they have to be.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Surround yourself with better, less shallow people.

~~~
sho
When you find a planet filled instead with these "better, less shallow
people", let us all know. Until then, we're stuck on this one, where the GP's
observations are 100% correct.

