 |
| Sakane standing next to a mock-up of the Laundroid, his laundry-folding robot, in Tokyo. Photo credit: Ko Sasaki |
Cars can now drive themselves.
Cellphones talk to us. How long will it be until laundry can fold itself?
At least two companies are promising to
bring laundry-folding robots for the home to market by the end of 2017. Known
as Laundroid and FoldiMate, both machines work by analyzing each garment they
take in, figuring out its ideal folding shape and delivering a drawer-ready
stack of smoothly folded clothes.
Laundroid is slightly smaller than a
typical refrigerator. The robot arms are inside.
The FoldiMate, more compact, has large
clips dangling outside, making it look like a mash-up of a clothesline and a
plastic oven.
A working prototype of Laundroid —
backed by about $90 million in investment capital— will be publicly
demonstrated at the end of this month in Tokyo. It will retail — only in Japan,
at first — for about $16,000. Seven Dreamers, the company introducing
Laundroid, aims to bring the cost down to $2,000 a unit and begin international
sales by next year.
Laundroid has an insert box and four
smaller drawers for up to 30 items of clean clothing.
“The robot arm picks up the clothes one
by one and then artificial intelligence recognizes if this is a T-shirt or
pants or pajamas,” Shin Sakane, Laundroid’s inventor, said in a Skype interview
from Japan.
Gal Rozov, an inventor of FoldiMate,
said his machine requires users to clip each article of clothing to its front.
The machine then pulls each into itself and folds.
Via a crowdfunding campaign on, Mr.
Rozov’s company has taken in about 8,000 deposits of $85, each granting the
customer a 10 percent discount off the final product, which has a target price
of $850, he said. The company aims to open pre-orders by the end of the year
and to start deliveries at the end of 2018.
Mr. Sakane received a Ph.D. in
chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Delaware in 2000 and returned
to his native Japan to work for his father’s company, Industrial Summit
Technology, which is known for selling a component that improves the efficiency
of laser printers. Mr. Sakane wanted to work on fully realized consumer
products.
He formed his own company, Seven
Dreamers, which already has two inventions on the market: One, called Nastent,
is a tube that slides up the nose to stop snoring (not yet for sale in the
United States); the other is a carbon-fiber golf shaft that is meant to
decrease drag.
Mr. Sakane said he was looking for a
business idea more than a decade ago when he asked his wife, “Is there anything
in your mind which is not available anywhere in the world, something to use at
home and something that you really, really want to have?
“And she said, ‘Of course! It’s a
laundry-folding robot!’ And then I thought ‘Yes, this is it!’”
So, has Mr. Sakane brought a Laundroid
into his own home yet?
“Not yet,” he said. “My wife keeps
asking me when.”
Last year, about 17 million washers and
dryers were sold in the United States, according to the Association of Home
Appliance Manufacturers. Mr. Sakane projected that Laundroid sales could reach
20 million units a year worldwide.
It’s an attractive future.
You can also watch this video by clicking on the Play Button
