| ▲ | karolist a day ago |
| Of all the tasks I do, folding clothes takes a ridiculously small slice of my time. Is this and all the other robotics videos aimed at H&M staff? |
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| ▲ | michaelt a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| They're trying to show their investors a butler robot that can do all types of household chores. Folding fabric has traditionally been very hard to solve with robots; the ideal places to grab the fabric might be hidden, the fabric patterns are repetitive, and the material flops around, tangles in the grippers, and brings other pieces of laundry with it. Successfully sorting and folding a basket of laundry shows they've got a control system capable of performing some quite difficult tasks. |
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| ▲ | karolist a day ago | parent | next [-] | | They also use a large ring attached to the first zipper to help the robot grab it. This is not a realistic zipper, but I do appreciate them being honest and showing that grabbing small objects is still not perfect | |
| ▲ | mk89 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | All you need to do to understand what task is more complex (for a robot to solve) is just to ask a 6-8 years old child to do it. It takes days before they "understand". So it cannot be that simple (for the reasons you mentioned). |
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| ▲ | hasyimibhar a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As a parent with 3 kids and both my wife and I working, folding clothes is the most tedious household chore. It's physically and mentally exhausting (unlike doing the dishes, which is only physically exhausting as I can wash piles of dishes while zoning out). And not to mention take so much time, a week's worth of unfolded pile of clothes for our entire household can take me 1-2 hours to fold uninterrupted (2-3 hours if I do it while watching Netflix or something). |
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| ▲ | wfwerwerwe a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep.. and with 3 kids so many of the time-consuming "tasks" are not open to automation because a human doing it is the point.. eg. bedtime books, bathing the kids, helping them make their lunch/breakfast, etc. | |
| ▲ | ygouzerh a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Small sharing tips, in case it can help: have the maximum of hangers possible. It take a bit more space, but the time saved is huge + it remove iron time for low wrinkle sensitive clothes (e.g cotton polo) |
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| ▲ | surfmike a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sorting and folding laundry is one of the most tedious chores in our household. Do you have kids? |
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| ▲ | karolist a day ago | parent | next [-] | | FYI I do have 3 kids, no, it doesn't take that long (we share this with the wife), in a few years the kids will be able to help us with this task so it's gonna be even less time. Doing household chores is good for the kids. I wouldn't wan't this robot driving around my household when I have small children anyway... | |
| ▲ | ileonichwiesz a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | If I did have kids, I probably wouldn’t want them to run around a big heavy robot with very little spatial awareness. |
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| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Come back when you have a family and you run a washing machine full of clothes per day. |
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| ▲ | Philip-J-Fry a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Don't you just throw all the washing into the washing machine, wait for it to actually do the work, and then hang it all up afterwards? It's like a 15 minute job max. | | |
| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean folding after it has been dried. I hate folding clothes. In my case luckily my wife doesn't mind (as I don't mind doing the rest of the process) but if in say 25 years from now there will be a relatively small and affordable folding appliance, I would totally buy it. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | Hopefully it won't take 25! | | |
| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent [-] | | I don't know, was already bitten by this in ~2015 with self-driving cars and thinking that my kids will never ever need a driving license so now I'm really cautious on these topics. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | How much self driving has arrived for you? | | |
| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent [-] | | Not enough to think that in 8 years there will be L5 autonomous cars available to be bought (at a reasonable price) where I live. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | L5 is impracticality high. The SAE levels aren't the right ones anyway. Comma.ai is only level 2 on their scale but it makes driving so much easier. | | |
| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but anything outside L4 or L5 will still need a driving license to drive the car. In 2015 I though that around 2035 that would be the case, but now I doubt it seriously. |
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| ▲ | brnt a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 80% will be in the laundry bin, your first task before doing anything is either shouting around the house to bring in the other 80% right now or go on expedition yourself. 10 minutes later you are at the washing machine, where you'll never be able to fit all laundry so it's two runs minimum. Somebody will hopefully in advance, but probably only prompted by your call around the house mention a number of particular items will be needed later today, certainly before the second load will be dry. You are now searching for those items. Or arguing for why you really don't have time and parents are humans too and not unpaid servants. Another 10 minutes later the first load is washing. You set a timer, or perhaps have a machine that pings you when done. Of course, you have More Shit To Do, so you don't notice your alarm or ping and by the end of the morning when you hoped to sit down to enjoy maybe a whole 15 minutes of reading move the first load to the dryer and put the second load on. You discover that somebody never emptied the dryer. Finders keepers! 1,5hr later you fortunately do not miss the alarm and take our the dry but not 100% dry laundry and move the second load to dry. 3hr later you empty the second dryer load, because the run took longer because nobody ever fucking cleans the lint-container. At least you had time to fold (which to the many item-types in your household and your poor fine motor control certainly does not take you _just_ 15 minutes). A cat decides to kick over a pile and leave hair in a second pile, causing you to redo some work. 30 minutes in your are done and finally have time to fold the second driers worth. Do you get it now? | | |
| ▲ | darkwater an hour ago | parent [-] | | Collecting the dirty clothes will be an impossible task even for a T-1000, but god having some kind of little thing that can open the washing machine, separate the items by type, put the ones that can go in thee tumble-dryer there and hang the others, and then fold all of them once they are dry, and leave them in the same room (no need to put them in the wardrobes), it would be such a dream for me. But again, it's probably a sci-fi dream that, just as flying cars, will never make sense to actually produce. |
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| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | karolist a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I replied to another comment, but I do have 3 kids. | | |
| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent [-] | | Everybody's different, I guess, but for me this is absolutely a chore I would automate away, and I don't want to "force" another human being to do it for me. |
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| ▲ | _diyar a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think its a ubiquitous task which requires some amount of precision dexterity, so its an easy to digest example. |
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| ▲ | infofarmer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A lot of smaller chores look trivial when considered in isolation, but have disproportionate time and mental cost because of how they fit in the flow of life. Sometimes the effect is similar to interrupting an engineer for a couple of minutes. |
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| ▲ | throwa356262 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Funny you mentioned H&M. They are boycotted on China due to their public stance against slave labour: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57691415 It is important to remember that China is not only about open weight LLMs, fastest cars and flying taxis. There is still a lot of very serious human right abuse going on in this country. |
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| ▲ | dannyw a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not super sure how relevant this is to the overall topic and thread, tbh. There's plenty of cheap yet real rebuttals, whether it's all the things with ICE (and not just the top-of-mind stuff; but effective deprivation of due process for suspects; etc), or even war crimes. I don't think it serves much purpose tbh -- it's not going to change anyone's mind. | | |
| ▲ | throwa356262 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | This was not a China/US good or bad comment. And I admit it was highly off topic. But maybe once in a while we need to remind ourselves that the world is more than stock prices and LM arena benchmarks? | |
| ▲ | dudisubekti a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, western lecture on human rights carry no weight these days lol (Israel support, Trump doing Trump thing, war in Iran, etc). They ruined their own reputation so the rest of the world just tuned out. |
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| ▲ | adrian_b a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | When the last day's news were about other people shot dead by ICE without a plausible reason, it is hard to take seriously discussions about human rights abuse coming from USA. It is hard to imagine a more serious abuse than being randomly killed on the street, while walking or driving during your normal daily routine. Unfortunately, there are very few, if any, countries remaining where human rights abuses are not frequent, so mentioning them in unrelated technology discussions has become non-relevant. |
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| ▲ | schnitzelstoat a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's one of the most annoying. I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler. But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc. |
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| ▲ | f6v a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have a pile of washed clothes that moves from the bed to the chair for a good week before it finally goes into the closet. |
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| ▲ | cynicalsecurity a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's meant for war. Today it folds your clothes, tomorrow it plants mines and shoots at you on a battlefield. |
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| ▲ | Joker_vD a day ago | parent | next [-] | | So is a pasta factory. Today it rolls and forms macaroni, tomorrow it makes bullets. Have you ever wondered why rigatoni are so wide? That's why. | | |
| ▲ | cynicalsecurity a day ago | parent [-] | | The pasta factory analogy is hilarious, get an upvote. Is it something from the WWII? | | |
| ▲ | Joker_vD 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, not really. The macaroni are formed by squeezing the dough through the openings, while the cartridge cases are made by stretching small metallic disks into cylindrical shape (and then stamping the bottom to make it flat and have a proper rim), so it's impossible to repurpose the pasta-forming machines into the casing-making ones. But it is an urban legend of sorts, along with "baby strollers with chain tracks instead of wheels", and shows how little most of us know about industrial manufacturing. |
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| ▲ | Cthulhu_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems overly complicated for that task (planting mines / shooting) when kamikaze drones are cheap and mass produced. | |
| ▲ | dudisubekti a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | What? There's already a better system today: mine launchers (remote minelaying system) |
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