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I like that their robot is pretty simple comparing to humanoid robots so cost should be much lower. I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does

by pzo 2y ago

I like that their robot is pretty simple comparing to humanoid robots so cost should be much lower. I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Instead I would like to see some new innovation in laundry machines. Current technology is very basic, you heat water and keep spinning. Why not some something more similar to bigger paper printer that at the end of the day you feed your 1 shirt, roll it into a roller, sprinkle with some high pressure minimal amount of water, heating and return 30min later already perfectly ironed.

M4v3R 2y ago
> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Folding laundry is not the end goal here. They chose it because it’s a very challenging thing for a robot to do, requiring great manual dexterity, planning, reacting to sensory inputs etc. In other words: if your robot can do your laundry it can probably be taught to do pretty much anything else around the house.
bitwize 2y ago
> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Because the people on the Axiom are going to need clean jumpsuits? Seriously, laundry folding is an example of a complex task that requires considerable dexterity and sophisticated object manipulation on the robot's part, but unlike cooking it's relatively low stakes: little harm is likely to be caused to the robot, the environment, or bystanding humans if the robot screws it up. So it makes a pretty good research task that, when solved for, will make impressive demos at trade events.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Yes, at least 3x per week. Young kids, toddlers, babies, workout clothes, sports clothes, work clothes, etc.
averageRoyalty 2y ago
> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Lots of people do 3-4 loads per week. Some people don't cook at home at all. There are 8 billion people out there.
- pzo 2y ago
  Some people don't cook at home but they still have to eat. Restaurants still have to hire people for doing cooking tasks.
rgbswan 2y ago
Small businesses like Cafes? They will hopefully get this to laundromats once this bot can iron, too. Not even once did I iron or fold my laundry back in university ...
semi-extrinsic 2y ago
> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week I can tell you do not have children. We frequently run 2 loads per day... Also, I challenge anyone to look at that video from 2:00 to 2:45 (which is 90 seconds IRL) and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with "intelligence". I have seen human babies at 5 months old severely outperform this thing.
saulrh 2y ago
Laundry is kind of the perfect demo for advanced motion planning systems. Fabric is, for all intents and purposes, completely intractable in classic motion planning paradigms; it's wildly non-rigid, which means that predicting its behavior is the domain of highly specialized and expensive dynamics simulators, it's nearly impossible to invert the problem to ask what motions would be required to produce a given result, and it's highly continuous and resistant to discretization even if you can predict it. You can't make the "folds have zero width" assumption you always see when reasoning about origami, for example. Clothing is extreme even for fabric, given that it's not only highly non-uniform but also fragile; every shirt is a different hideous bit of floppy topology covered in strange textures with complex and unpredictable local properties and it'll start popping stitches if you look at it funny. Ruffles, zippers, pockets, drawstrings, the list goes on. On top of that, laundry is something that everyone does so it's relatable and easy to set up in a lab, and humans can intuitively evaluate performance with a glance. Despite all the attention, nobody's been able to demonstrate convincing performance on it in like seventy years of work, which makes it a more difficult task than backflips or shooting hoops or loading a truck. All of that together means that, when you have a fancy new algorithm that can handle more than some blocks on a tabletop, you pretty much always point it at the laundry.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  And just to be clear, this is still not "convincing performance" since it is still the WYSIWIG model of robotics in the sense that it can only do exactly what you see it doing in the videos. It can fold a couple of shirts and a pair of pants and wouldn't, e.g., be able to fold my hoodies, never mind a bra or something else with straps. The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first): Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end. > Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Thing is, cooking is something a lot of people find deeply rewarding and humanizing (I don't, but I realize I'm an outlier here). Meanwhile, I challenge you to find anyone who thinks doing laundry is a worthwhile use of their limited time on Earth.
- pzo 2y ago
  My point is from business perspective cooking is much bigger market since this applies to B2B as well (commercial laundry is not as big) - many restaurants would happily buy such robot and pay even more than typical home user. I also think solving cooking is simpler task than folding any types of clothes - they could even simplify further by focusing first on making burgers/pizza/sandwich/kebab only and be profitable much faster.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  > Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end. Pretty much this. You’ll be folding clothes while washing more at the same time. And it isn’t just the folding that is a challenge. It’s putting it away. I’d gladly take a “put the clothes away” robot before I got a “fold the clothes” robot.
vasco 2y ago
I got myself this perfect clothes folding robot about 8 years ago when I decided I would not fold or iron clothes ever again. Two useless activities forever gone from my life. There's more things like this around the house but folding and ironing are 100% useless. I pick the clothes from the rack, they come kinda folded in half but I don't even try, and all get dumped into drawers. I never lack space because I'll buy clothes only upon throwing out clothes, so the bigger volume of the clothes doesn't make a difference in storage space either.
- tacocataco 2y ago
  I just leave the clothes on the rack. I can see what I have better and my clothes smell better getting aired out more compared to sitting in a drawer. This also means I use less floor space as I don't need cabinets/dressers to hold them. And yes, I have many racks on my walls. The rack life is good.
  - vasco 2y ago
    That sounds like a great setup, my place had inbuilt ones but that's the spirit.

by pzo 2y ago

M4v3R 2y ago

> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Folding laundry is not the end goal here. They chose it because it’s a very challenging thing for a robot to do, requiring great manual dexterity, planning, reacting to sensory inputs etc. In other words: if your robot can do your laundry it can probably be taught to do pretty much anything else around the house.

bitwize 2y ago

> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Because the people on the Axiom are going to need clean jumpsuits? Seriously, laundry folding is an example of a complex task that requires considerable dexterity and sophisticated object manipulation on the robot's part, but unlike cooking it's relatively low stakes: little harm is likely to be caused to the robot, the environment, or bystanding humans if the robot screws it up. So it makes a pretty good research task that, when solved for, will make impressive demos at trade events.

lotsofpulp 2y ago

> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Yes, at least 3x per week. Young kids, toddlers, babies, workout clothes, sports clothes, work clothes, etc.

averageRoyalty 2y ago

pzo 2y ago
Some people don't cook at home but they still have to eat. Restaurants still have to hire people for doing cooking tasks.

rgbswan 2y ago

Small businesses like Cafes? They will hopefully get this to laundromats once this bot can iron, too. Not even once did I iron or fold my laundry back in university ...

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week I can tell you do not have children. We frequently run 2 loads per day... Also, I challenge anyone to look at that video from 2:00 to 2:45 (which is 90 seconds IRL) and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with "intelligence". I have seen human babies at 5 months old severely outperform this thing.

saulrh 2y ago

Laundry is kind of the perfect demo for advanced motion planning systems. Fabric is, for all intents and purposes, completely intractable in classic motion planning paradigms; it's wildly non-rigid, which means that predicting its behavior is the domain of highly specialized and expensive dynamics simulators, it's nearly impossible to invert the problem to ask what motions would be required to produce a given result, and it's highly continuous and resistant to discretization even if you can predict it. You can't make the "folds have zero width" assumption you always see when reasoning about origami, for example. Clothing is extreme even for fabric, given that it's not only highly non-uniform but also fragile; every shirt is a different hideous bit of floppy topology covered in strange textures with complex and unpredictable local properties and it'll start popping stitches if you look at it funny. Ruffles, zippers, pockets, drawstrings, the list goes on. On top of that, laundry is something that everyone does so it's relatable and easy to set up in a lab, and humans can intuitively evaluate performance with a glance. Despite all the attention, nobody's been able to demonstrate convincing performance on it in like seventy years of work, which makes it a more difficult task than backflips or shooting hoops or loading a truck. All of that together means that, when you have a fancy new algorithm that can handle more than some blocks on a tabletop, you pretty much always point it at the laundry.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
And just to be clear, this is still not "convincing performance" since it is still the WYSIWIG model of robotics in the sense that it can only do exactly what you see it doing in the videos. It can fold a couple of shirts and a pair of pants and wouldn't, e.g., be able to fold my hoodies, never mind a bra or something else with straps. The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first): Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end. > Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day. Thing is, cooking is something a lot of people find deeply rewarding and humanizing (I don't, but I realize I'm an outlier here). Meanwhile, I challenge you to find anyone who thinks doing laundry is a worthwhile use of their limited time on Earth.

pzo 2y ago
My point is from business perspective cooking is much bigger market since this applies to B2B as well (commercial laundry is not as big) - many restaurants would happily buy such robot and pay even more than typical home user. I also think solving cooking is simpler task than folding any types of clothes - they could even simplify further by focusing first on making burgers/pizza/sandwich/kebab only and be profitable much faster.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
> Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end. Pretty much this. You’ll be folding clothes while washing more at the same time. And it isn’t just the folding that is a challenge. It’s putting it away. I’d gladly take a “put the clothes away” robot before I got a “fold the clothes” robot.

vasco 2y ago

I got myself this perfect clothes folding robot about 8 years ago when I decided I would not fold or iron clothes ever again. Two useless activities forever gone from my life. There's more things like this around the house but folding and ironing are 100% useless. I pick the clothes from the rack, they come kinda folded in half but I don't even try, and all get dumped into drawers. I never lack space because I'll buy clothes only upon throwing out clothes, so the bigger volume of the clothes doesn't make a difference in storage space either.

tacocataco 2y ago
I just leave the clothes on the rack. I can see what I have better and my clothes smell better getting aired out more compared to sitting in a drawer. This also means I use less floor space as I don't need cabinets/dressers to hold them. And yes, I have many racks on my walls. The rack life is good.
- vasco 2y ago
  That sounds like a great setup, my place had inbuilt ones but that's the spirit.