Anyone who has tried to live alone (and by alone, I mean no household help, not even part-time) will most probably agree with me that folding clothes is such a pain in the arse. I mean, come on! It personally takes me some three tries before I can successfully fold a simple short-sleeve shirt, let alone a long sleeve one. I am sometimes just tempted to fold each of the clothing item the way I want just to get the chore done and over with. If there is a device that can do the washing and the drying, why isn’t there that can do the folding? A laundry-folding robot?
Well, folks, our wait is over! Presenting the “laundroid” – a device that can wash and dry clothing, then identify each clothing item and neatly fold them up. The Japanese technology, produced by Panasonic, together with Seven Dreamers and Daiwa, is about the size of a refrigerator, and is said to be capable of folding a t-short in about five to 10 minutes.
Laundry-folding robot (Source: Seven Dreamers Laboratories)
Wait, what? Ten minutes! The creators admit that laundroid’s present turn-around time is exceedingly long compared to manual work, but it is committed to shortening that and also reducing the product’s size as soon as it hits the market by 2017.
Laundroid’s trump card is its ability to recognize the type of clothing and to fold the item by means of its robotic arm. It has an automated opening in the center in which the user can toss the piece of clothing. The machine accepts the item, then after folding it, tosses it out neat and tidy.
Laundry-folding robot (Video source: Japan Times)
The makers of laundroid plans to integrate the device with its user’s home by 2020, in that the user can simply dump their used clothes into laundroid, and the machine itself will put them in their proper closet spaces once washed, dried and folded. The creators, as early as now, envision that laundroid will be most useful in hospitals and nursing care facilities, which require an exceedingly high volume of items to be washed, dried and folded.
A prototype of laundroid was demonstrated at the CEATEC trade fair, Japan’s biggest IT and electronics fair.
Laundry-folding robot (Source: Kazumichi Moriyama)
