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I think you can buy an autonomous lawnmower, but I don’t know how effective it is. My roombas sadly haven’t replaced our normal vacuum. Of the three companies

I think you can buy an autonomous lawnmower, but I don’t know how effective it is. My roombas sadly haven’t replaced our normal vacuum. Of the three companies listed in this article two of them were (expensive) toy companies, and the third was a crappy Alexa clone. A Roomba solves a problem. Maybe not as well as we’d hope, but most of the time, it does a good enough job. Dishes and clothes can be cleaned mostly automatically. The other household tasks are hard to solve. I’m thinking dusting, taking the trash out, ferrying the clothes to and from the washer. Loading and unloading the dishwasher. I’d love to have something do these for me, but they’re very hard problems, and I don’t expect them to be solved in my lifetime. Until C-3PO becomes a consumer product, I don’t see this space making any money.

mikepurvis 7y ago
They're also occasional problems. A typical household does 1-3 loads of dishes per day, and a few loads of laundry per week. The easy-to-automate parts of these tasks have already been automated, and now only the hardest/suckiest parts remain. Restaurants and hotels do dozens of loads of dishes and laundry every day, so that additional expense and complexity required to automated the final 10% of these tasks is much easier to justify. So if you want to build a machine the folds laundry, don't build something ridiculous like the Foldimate, build a machine that folds bedding for a hotel.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  If you've got a child or two you might find you do laundry every day. We certainly do, although I appreciate using cloth diapers makes that more necessary than it might otherwise be. But yes, hotels, prisons, hospitals, and similar places would be the initial target-markets for anything laundry-related.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    I do have three kids, and we cloth-diapered the first two, so yeah you're right that alone is several more loads a week. Though we only ever did it on alternate days, and the burden of folding the CD loads is way less— we basically just stacked them all up in pile under the change table.

mikepurvis 7y ago

They're also occasional problems. A typical household does 1-3 loads of dishes per day, and a few loads of laundry per week. The easy-to-automate parts of these tasks have already been automated, and now only the hardest/suckiest parts remain. Restaurants and hotels do dozens of loads of dishes and laundry every day, so that additional expense and complexity required to automated the final 10% of these tasks is much easier to justify. So if you want to build a machine the folds laundry, don't build something ridiculous like the Foldimate, build a machine that folds bedding for a hotel.

stevekemp 7y ago
If you've got a child or two you might find you do laundry every day. We certainly do, although I appreciate using cloth diapers makes that more necessary than it might otherwise be. But yes, hotels, prisons, hospitals, and similar places would be the initial target-markets for anything laundry-related.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I do have three kids, and we cloth-diapered the first two, so yeah you're right that alone is several more loads a week. Though we only ever did it on alternate days, and the burden of folding the CD loads is way less— we basically just stacked them all up in pile under the change table.