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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

The biggest breakthrough in AI will come when someone builds a robot that can fold a shirt.

Yeah someone made a big claim about it being increadibly hard for robots to deal with cloth. It's true it is tricky, but the shirt folding problems has been solved for a while.

https://foldimate.com/

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16865506/laundroid-laundr...

"The Foldimate demo I saw wasn’t actually a fully working prototype, meaning clothes-folding technology wasn’t all there yet."

So not quite solved just yet. And I'll give you long odds against them working out the kinks in the next five years.

A general purpose cloth folder is difficult, but standardized pieces are covered.

https://youtu.be/OpiFp9i6owY?t=209

It's tough, but the industrial laundry business more or less has this working. Not much AI, lots of compressed air.

1. Robes and sheets != shirts

2. Human operators are doing the heavy lifting (quite literally) by loading the pieces one by one in a standardized initial state.

I'm talking about a machine that will fold men's shirts that are initially sitting in a pile just as they came out of the dryer.

So in the video, the user still had to manually insert each piece of clothing into the machine individually. I would have just folded it myself at that point and it would have been quicker too. I thought the whole point was for human not to have bother with this meaningless non-value added task.

It's quite astounding when you think about how much of our life has been automated or made virtual. But basic house hold tasks like cooking, dishes, tidying up, folding clothes are still fully manual. Also shopping for food, vacuum or tending your garden (for the majority of us). Tasks which all together take many hours each week.

Think about all the time going to waste. Yes, there are tasks which some actually want to keep manual (maybe you love cooking) and there are (subpar) online service, which try to replace that labor, but there is no automatic option otherwise. And outsourcing labor is not what I mean. I want a washing machine at home, which is a lot simpler to handle than outsourcing it to a washing business.

I sometimes wonder, if the reason is really a technical one or if there are other factors, social or incentive problems, which hold progress back in those areas...

When it comes to folding shirts it really is a technological limit. Folding shirts just turns out to be incredibly hard.

Try folding a shirt with mittens on some time to get some idea of what a robot with a standard manipulator would have to deal with.

Here's a Willow Garage PR2 doing it.[1] Very, very slowly.

[1] https://youtu.be/YdStbvguvwU

I don't want to denigrate this effort in any way, because this robot is very cool and represents real progress. But that's not a shirt.

I mean, I'm not very good at folding shirts anyway.

Maybe the solution is lower standards?

Reminds me of some story about a person doing something and another person saying "that looks painful, what's the trick", with the answer being "not minding that it hurts".

I consider true AI is possible only when it is able to read through an entire novel or book and then provide an accurate summary of its story or plots that not only makes sense, but correctly conveys the emotional aspect of those books. Remember a lot of meanings or sentiments from the stories in those books are implicit, and so they do require a certain level of emotional processing to interpret it correctly.

Wasn't there a laundry folding machine released not too long ago? It flopped though.

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