I’m not even particular skilled at laundry but I can easily manipulate clothes in complex ways at speed. I can use a sudden flick to turn things inside out, or flat-fold a mattress cover.
I suspect we’re at least five years away from those rather ordinary capabilities in robots.
Maybe. Here's a robot at Berkeley folding towels in 2010.[1] A Willow Garage robot folding jeans in 2012.[2] Foldimate in 2017.[3] Even boring old Chicago Dryer had this working by 2021.[4]
They're all really slow. That's because they have no understanding of dynamics. The item has to come to a full stop between operations. Chicago Dryer got past that problem with a sequence of steps at different stations, each station taking about one second. That yields a useful commercial machine for large laundries.
It's just a demo problem, though. The approach is interesting. They're trying to use LLM technology on a completely different kind of problem. For that, you need a lot of training data.
If you're going to do things in this way, you need data from the inside of doing it. That's hard to acquire, but not impossible. They claim to use "robotic training data". Not sure if this is from robots being operated by humans as teleoperators. Others have tried that. There's a Stanford project that looks very similar. Something like this has been used to train quadrotor drone controllers. There's no obvious cheap way to acquire lots of data of this type, though. You have to run your own experimental setup and log.
Motion tracking from vision on a squirrel colony would be interesting as a data source. Squirrels are very agile and easy to observe. Then run the skeleton movement data back through a simulator and try to extract the forces the muscles are exerting. Now you have something usable for training an agile robot. Maybe sports videos could be used for training.
[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/papers/Maitin-Shep...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtbcYE4Z4o
I agree, and I think it will be even longer before people are comfortable with a clothes-folding robot in their home even if the capability is technically there.
As much as I would love to never fold a t-shirt again, I’m also not willing to pay likely thousands of dollars to put a bulky set of robotic arms in my laundry room that moreover pose a non-zero risk of injuring somebody, particularly a child. If it’s skilled enough to turn things inside out with a sudden flick, it’s also skilled enough to poke your eyes out with a flick.
I feel like if the goal is to simplify people’s lives, the entire process of laundry needs to be re-imagined, from the basket to the return to closet. It should essentially be a black box - I toss my dirty clothes in a hole, and behind the scenes the washer and dryer decide what to wash in what loads and when, fold or hang the dry clothes and return them to storage (drawer or closet). The home layout may need to be reimagined to place all of these unit operations in close proximity.
Or, you reimagine washing/drying as more of a clean-in-place process - like the closet doubles as both storage and as washer/dryer and the robotics move the cleaning supplies to the clothes, rather than vice versa. The same could be applied to dishes - the dishwasher is the cabinet.
Another interesting opportunity arises when you automate batch handling - you can spread out the cleaning process to be more continuous. Rather than do huge loads, you can soak each item as they become dirty and take more advantage of residence time, which will use the water and detergents more effectively.
There are so many opportunities for reinvention of cleaning processes in the home, it feels like automating the way humans currently do it is inefficient for many reasons.
The maid from The Jetsons is due in about 2018 by Elon's timeLIEn.
I think it's more like 30 years than 5 for that sort of intelligence to be practically deployable.
With hands, not some purpose-designed tool.
It's slow but the trajectory of improvements is clear and rapid.
Currently you're better off hiring the person piloting the awkward robot to fold your clothes than having them pilot an unnecessary robot.