Laundroid

» see laundroid.sevendreamers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

CEATEC opened in Tokyo on 7 October 2015 and the thing everybody filmed that week was a tall white cabinet that ate a crumpled t-shirt and, several minutes later, produced a folded one. Seven Dreamers called it Laundroid and called it a world first, which it was. The machine behind the door used cameras to work out what garment it had been handed, then manipulated it until the shape matched something it recognized, then folded along the lines that shape implied.

The company behind it was not a toy shop. Shinichi Sakane's seven dreamers laboratories had already built a carbon-fiber golf shaft business and a medical device for sleep apnea, and Laundroid was pitched as the third act. Panasonic and Daiwa House signed on as joint developers, which meant the appliance giant and the housebuilder were both planning for a version of this that lived inside a wall. In November 2016 the company raised an additional $60 million led by those two plus SBI Investment.

Pre-orders opened in March 2017 at ¥1.85 million, somewhere around sixteen thousand dollars, for a prototype that still took minutes per garment. The full wash-dry-fold appliance was promised for 2019. On 23 April 2019 Seven Dreamers filed for bankruptcy at the Tokyo District Court instead. Teikoku Databank put the debt at roughly ¥2.2 billion across about 200 creditors, and a spokesman said plainly that the money needed for development had not been secured and that the robot could not be improved to a satisfactory level.

~ the chronicle ~

~ why cloth is hard ~

This is the part I can speak to directly, because recognizing objects from camera data is what I do for a living now. Almost everything a vision system is normally asked to identify has a shape. A cup is cup-shaped from any angle. A car has edges that stay in the same relationship to each other no matter where you stand. You can train on that.

A t-shirt in a heap has no shape at all. It has one shape when it is flat and an unbounded number of shapes when it is not, and the robot has to get from the second to the first before it can even begin to decide what it is looking at. Laundroid's answer was to shake the garment out, photograph it, guess, and try again, which is why one shirt took five to ten minutes. That number was not a software bug anybody was going to patch away in a release. It was the problem.

~ the money and the partners ~

The partnerships are what make this one worth filing rather than filing away. A hardware startup that cannot find a manufacturer is a familiar story. Seven Dreamers had Panasonic, which has been making washing machines since the 1950s, and Daiwa House, which builds the houses the machines go in. Rhizomatiks did the industrial design, and the coverage ran from Nikkei to Gizmodo with the Japan Times writing it up twice. None of that changes the arithmetic of a sixteen thousand dollar appliance the size of a refrigerator that folds slower than a person does. The money bought four more years of trying to make the folding fast enough that the price stopped being absurd, and the folding did not get fast enough.

~ april 2019 ~

Nothing shipped. The people who had put money down in 2017 were creditors in a bankruptcy filing by 2019, which is a specific and nasty way to lose a pre-order, and the robot they had paid for existed only as units that had been wheeled onto trade show floors.

Laundroid was never going to arrive in Turkey. It was a Japanese domestic appliance at a Japanese domestic price, demonstrated at Japanese trade shows, and the nearest most of us outside Japan ever came to it was a thirty-second clip of a shirt going in rumpled and coming out flat. It is still the most honest demonstration of the gap between a thing a camera can see and a thing a camera can understand that I have watched on a consumer product.

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