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Comment by askl | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting to be disappointed at seeing another humanoid robot that can fold laundry BS startup.

But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.

I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.

I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.

Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.

> I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.

What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.

I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.

At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?

Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.

Yeah, that assumption is correct. So doing laundry for others as well wasn't really something I was considering.

There are four of us. It takes me 5 minutes to gather everything up and put it in the washing machine, 3 minutes to transfer it to the dryer when it's done, and ten minutes to separate it out and drop it in the right drawers when dry. That happens 3-4 times a week. Say 60-80 minutes total per week.

I have found that in order to reduce laundry times to something like this, you have to very deliberately make very specific tradeoffs in the types of clothes you wear and purchase. It is perfectly possible to have a wardrobe that is very low-maintenance (such as by opting for synthetics or synthetic blends for all your clothing), but more likely you have some special cases such as wool, linen, and cotton (which may require air drying and/or ironing or steaming), clothing with small stains that require spot cleaning with stain remover, delicates that need to be hand-washed, whites that need to go in their own load with bleach, or other specific cases.

True. We very much value time over owning things that require that much maintenance. If your preference is the other way round I could see it taking up much more time (and you getting, presumably, more joy from your clothes. Most of the joy I get from clothes is from t-shirt designs. YMMV.)

Laundry folding machines already exist. What are you excited about?

folding laundry is not useful?

Definitely not. I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins. Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.

Better to put the items on hangers.

It would be. But it also feels like the "Can it run Crysis?" of robotics.

By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.

If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful. But it doesn’t, really.

It is about as useful as robot that chews your food for you

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