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Crosses fingers for a general purpose laundry folding bot

smokel 11d ago
We've come a long way from watching 50x speedups [1] to real-time [2] videos of watching robots fold clothes, student-style. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo [2] https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0 https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0
- num42 11d ago
  Off-topic, but even though it was 16 years ago, the robot looks so beautiful and well-designed. It looks so aesthetic!
  - eichin 11d ago
    It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)
King-Aaron 11d ago
I just want my laundry folding robot to run slower than me, and not be able to do karate backflips etc in the event of some undesired scope creep happening one day.
- nannal 11d ago
  House scale Faraday cages and an airlock for fiber optics. Should be sufficient until maybe 2032.
mxmilkiib 11d ago
I've got a collection of socks needing darning!
- brookst 11d ago
  Oh great now you’re outsourcing the “where the hell did the other sock go and why are there always odd numbers coming out of the dryer” existential crises to AI. Is there no aspect of the human experience you won’t cede to machines?
bluebarbet 11d ago
To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.
- embedding-shape 11d ago
  I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.
  - brookst 11d ago
    I genuinely don’t understand this binary thinking. You could easily turn it around: if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise. Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym. Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?
    - bluebarbet 11d ago
      True, but both of you are missing my main point. >if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.
- showerst 11d ago
  Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.
- 11d ago
deleted 11d ago
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We've come a long way from watching 50x speedups [1] to real-time [2] videos of watching robots fold clothes, student-style. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo [2] https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0 https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0

num42 11d ago
Off-topic, but even though it was 16 years ago, the robot looks so beautiful and well-designed. It looks so aesthetic!
- eichin 11d ago
  It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)

King-Aaron 11d ago

I just want my laundry folding robot to run slower than me, and not be able to do karate backflips etc in the event of some undesired scope creep happening one day.

nannal 11d ago
House scale Faraday cages and an airlock for fiber optics. Should be sufficient until maybe 2032.

mxmilkiib 11d ago

I've got a collection of socks needing darning!

brookst 11d ago
Oh great now you’re outsourcing the “where the hell did the other sock go and why are there always odd numbers coming out of the dryer” existential crises to AI. Is there no aspect of the human experience you won’t cede to machines?

bluebarbet 11d ago

To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.

embedding-shape 11d ago
I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.
- brookst 11d ago
  I genuinely don’t understand this binary thinking. You could easily turn it around: if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise. Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym. Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?
  - bluebarbet 11d ago
    True, but both of you are missing my main point. >if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.
showerst 11d ago
Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.
11d ago

deleted 11d ago

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