If you scroll down, this is a general-purpose robot. It can drive around and bus the table or fold a cardboard box.

I'm not sure it can't handle the softener, and V2 will likely be able to set up the ironing board.

In terms of size, even now, it's smaller than a fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, or many other household time-saving appliances common in most houses (although not necessarily historic cities with multi-century homes not designed for them). No effort has gone into shrinking it either; perhaps with clever engineering, it can be made much smaller if it moves out of the research prototype phase.

Another question, to me, is cost. Many robots like this run around $100k, and with good reason. Can this be brought down? I hope so.

The water bottle is usually a common hard test for robots. The softener bottle raise the stakes even more. Because every time I handle it, I need to wash my hands afterwards.

Ironing board is bigger than the robot, and quite heavy, the torque in setting it up is a lot and probably greater than the torque necessary to break the expensive actuator when things go wrong.

Keeping a shared table clean so you can fold clothes on it is a not trivial but more manageable problem.

The home market is highly predatory. If people have enough to invest in a home robot, it means that they have some available money that other actors didn't grab. In France last time they remove 5€ per month of renting help, it was a struggle for lot of people.

You have lots of actors that call dibs on your home improvement money before you can improve your home. There is usually the landlord, then the building manager (or Home Owner Association) (which is usually already working in the kleptocracy domain), then there are local tax, and mandatory ecological improvements (thermal isolation, and windows), home improvement market (paints and kitchen), and of course everything is indexed on the current cost of energy, and uncontrolled inflation.

It's not a question of costs, otherwise all smart investment improvements that bring more than they cost on the relevant time-scales like thermal isolation and solar power infrastructure, collective infrastructure, not having to do the laundry every week..., would have been done already. It's more about determining who deserve the money.

I don't use fabric softener, but that's a solved problem. The laundry machine I have takes both laundry detergent and, if I used it, fabric softener and dispenses those by itself.

Actuators, competently designed, won't break when torque gets too high:

1) The control system can handle this, trivially.

2) The mechanical linkage can be designed to limit torque. At some point, it should slip.

3) Forces out-of-axis should not be transferred to the actuator

The kleptocracy is more a function of rent-seeking city living. Even a little ways out, into the suburbs, things are very different. Rural, and space is virtually free.

>Actuators, competently designed, won't break when torque gets too high

The mechanical part of robotics is quite challenging. Because of the overhangs, 6DOF arms usually are bulky to be able provide useful force. Alternatively too strong industrial robots are unsafe to operate near humans even if compliant.

But most probably even robot building startup can't even attempt it. (They are not looking for mechanical engineer in their job listing, so probably they don't design the robot arm themselves).

If you don't design the robot arm yourself, then you only have the option of which off the shelf actuators to pick. Usually they are weak and expensive. And how to integrate them while staying in specs.

For manipulation sensory input is very useful, but if the API of your robot arm doesn't provide the feedback you do with what you have. When forces are weak closed-controlled loop system don't flex and can know their position, when things flex and deform, it allows to have lighter arms, but the robot can't know it's internal state. Here they close the loop via visual feedback, so knowing position exactly is not so important : humans have shitty repeatability but handle folding the laundry quite well.

But shitty robot arms are not very useful and also need the same motors and controls that good robot arms, so you might as well make your task easier and develop your robot with expensive arms first so prices converge towards expensive robot arms, and the economics equations of this market (high R&D cost, low sell volume) are geared not for home applications but industrial control which usually necessitate maintenance operations on the robots themselves.

What's even worse for the business model, is that once you have spend money to gather data and build a dataset to teach your neural networks, then your competitors only have to copy, vertically integrate, improve, scale and grab the money pot.

One of home robotics main obstacle is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem where no one wants to front the costs of building the datasets, front the costs of cheap actuators, front the costs of cheap prototypes so everyone reinvents their own solution which can't solve the economic equation.

Good point.

When I was younger, I'd have argued the collective action problem is just a matter of time and development, but I've now seen dozens of technologies stalled out.

I firmly believe it's the reason we don't have flying cars. I can sketch out all the pieces needed to get there, which in the simplest-to-explain version consist of a few regulatory changes, an autogyro, a control system, and some infrastructure, but those few changes easily add up to an obscene amount of money. Once invested, the next competitor can do almost the same thing almost out of a garage.

Lots of medical technologies too. And medical systemic changes. Education too.

Laundromats are kind of a drag since you have to hang around nearby for almost 2 hours to do the 5 minutes of labor that the machines don't do for you. Dropping off a sack of clothes for wash & fold on the other hand is a pricey luxury. Perhaps if the laundromats could automate the whole process it would bring down the price of wash and fold and fewer people would be inclined to have washing machine at home (as you say, taking up space for a machine that is used a couple hours a week)

Alternatively you can simply attach the laundromat to a cafe or bar, turning a chore into an opportunity to relax and socialize but most of the world is not prepared for that degree of civilization.

Yes and the laundromat user interface could simply be a package locker style wall and an app.

An adjacent use case is apartment buildings that currently have shared washer and dryer rooms that tenants book time slots for. Upgrade: drop off a tagged laundry bag anytime, pick up when convenient from locker. Only service technicians need room access so layout and washers and dryers can be robot optimized.

Why would you think a laundry robot is something people who can't afford comfortable apartment with their own washing machine might use?

I think this might be eventually integrated with washing machine so that you buy one device where you put your dirty clothes in and take out clean and folded. It's not like the traditional washing machine is the expensive part that needs to be kept separate and in current form.

> The cost of rent is 30€ per square meter per month in Paris.

Only for big enough apartments. 20m² appartements do not go for under 850€, ie around 42€/m². Granted these flats are too small to even have a laundry machine, let alone a laundry folding robot.