This Laundry Robot Can Almost Wash All Your Clothes for You

For as long as humans have been washing clothes, we've dreamed up ways to make that bothersome chore a bit easier, progressing from little-more-than sticks and logs to washboards, all the way up to today's "smart" washing machines from the likes of Samsung and Whirlpool. But we still haven't quite reached the level of comfort enjoyed by the Jetsons, who of course had a robot maid named Rosie to take care of all* their chores.

I'm pleased to say we are getting closer, however. Scientists from the University of California-Berkeley and University of Massachusetts in Amherst have developed software that can almost make a robot do the laundry entirely for you.

The software, which the scientists have been working on for several years now, relies on a Microsoft Kinect sensor attached to a programmable PR2 robot. With the sensor, the robot can see dirty clothes in a pile, put them in a laundry basket, move the basket to a laundry machine, load the machine, close the door, and fold clean clothes. Still missing are instructions that would let it load soap, transfer clothes from washer to dryer, and pull the clothes out of either machine.

Nonetheless, the laundry robot is no slouch, given the fact that for as mundane as washing clothes seems, completing all the necessary steps involved reliably is actually quite challenging for a bot. As the scientists wrote in a new paper on their work presented at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Austin late last month: "The exact number of clothes in the heap and the number that may be picked up with each grasp cannot be determined precisely" by the robot, so it essentially has to guess and keep going until there are no more clothes in sight.

So far, their software computes a solution to that problem in "less than one second," though actually moving and loading the clothes takes far longer—about 15 minutes—as seen in the 30x-sped-up video above. It's still a ways away from getting kids out of their chores, but maybe it will be ready by the time we're moving into our space homes.

*Judy Jetson actually did the laundry herself in at least one episode of the 1980s series, a distressing reminder of how retrograde the show actually was overall in terms of gender roles and society.