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Robotics AI

Laundry-Sorting Robot Spurs AI Hopes and Fears At Europe's Biggest Tech Event (theguardian.com) 41

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: This year's Web Summit, in Lisbon, was all about artificial intelligence -- and a robot sorting laundry. Digit, a humanoid built by the US firm Agility Robotics, demonstrated how far AI has come in a few years by responding to voice commands -- filtered through Google's Gemini AI model -- to sift through a pile of colored T-shirts and place them in a basket. It wasn't a seamless demonstration but the enthusiastic response, nearly two years on from the launch of ChatGPT, reflected the excitement about all things AI that pervaded Europe's biggest annual tech conference.

[...] Digit is being used in warehouses by GXO, a US logistics company, to lift boxes and place them on conveyor belts. According to the chief executive of Agility Robotics, Peggy Johnson, a new role could be created managing teams of Digits doing physical work. "Employees who were previously doing this physical work, appreciate the fact that they can hand that off to Digit," she said. "Then it allows them to do a number of other things, one of which is to be a robot manager."
"Talk of a bust in the AI boom could not be heard over the shouts of encouragement for Digit as it pondered different shades of garment," reports The Guardian. "Nonetheless, the voices of caution were there, discussing familiar themes such as safety, jobs and the climate, as AI comes to influence a huge range of industries."
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Laundry-Sorting Robot Spurs AI Hopes and Fears At Europe's Biggest Tech Event

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  • by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Friday November 15, 2024 @04:48PM (#64948837)
    I think you could build a robot who sorts things by color with Lego Mindstorms in the 1990s. Does it at least, like, fold the t-shirts?
    • by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Friday November 15, 2024 @05:53PM (#64948975) Homepage Journal

      Fabric is famously hard for robots to deal with. Rigid plastic blocks are pretty much the exact opposite of that. Fabric can be thick, thin, bendy, not bendy, slippery, squishy, elastic, inelastic etc etc. Picking up and folding a thin women's silk blouse is very different from picking up and folding a thick wool russian military winter jacket. Both are fabric, and we both know roughly how they react - but pre LLM how did you quantify that in a way a computer could understand?
       
      Robots sorting laundry is bleeding edge stuff.

  • "Laundry-Sorting Robot Spurs AI Hopes and Fears"

    What a time to be alive.

    • I always imagined a future were we didn't have to wear complicated clothing that needed to be washed. Self washing robes. Or simple nudity in a climate-controlled environment.

      This, on the other hand, seems like one of those old-timey illustrations of a future where men would go to a barbershop filled with robotic arms to get a shave with a straight razor. Or a mail carrier would hand-deliver letters to 10th story windows on his flying motorcycle. Just total retro-future type stuff, and that's what a laundry

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        THe reason is simple: This demonstration is a meaningless stunt, designed to impress the clueless. Hence it is exactly like that barbershop or mail-delivery, because that is by intent.

      • This, on the other hand, seems like one of those old-timey illustrations of a future where men would go to a barbershop filled with robotic arms to get a shave with a straight razor. Or a mail carrier would hand-deliver letters to 10th story windows on his flying motorcycle.

        Or a Chinese man running a restaurant from a flying Junk [wikipedia.org] would bring food directly to Korbin Dallas' apartment in the 5000 block of New York City.

  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    ... you could use color fast dyes and wash everything together.

  • by zephvark ( 1812804 ) on Friday November 15, 2024 @05:59PM (#64948985)

    Apparently, colors used to bleed a lot in the 1960s. If we can send this AI back in time 80 years or so, we'll make a fortune.

    • The era of Big Tech that gave us things like Uber and DoorDash also brought us Juicero and plenty of other failed startups that managed to appify things like laundry. This is just a continuation of the tech trend of building replacements for things your mom used to do for you.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. These days, you can even wash black and white together with no adverse effects. It will be hard to even find stuff dyed so cheaply as to make that a problem.

  • ...than minimum wage labour, or more likely, undocumented labour? That's what your manual labour robots are competing with in the USA.

    In developed countries with better labour laws and more effective enforcement, robot manual labour might actually make economic sense.
    • We really need robots to sort laundry?

      Really?

      Is there anyone who sorts laundry as a career?

      • Hmm, housekeepers have to laundry sheets, pillow cases and towels as part of their routine. Otherwise, nah, no one needs this although if you could get it to vacuum, pick up the kids' toys, wash dishes, load and unload the dishwasher AND do all the laundry tasks, ie retrieve basket, load washer, add soap, etc. Now that could be a very cool robot to have.

        Program that shit to laugh at your stupid jokes, watch tv with you and give it some extra adult equipment and who needs a spouse now! Yep, we're doomed!

      • It's a big step closer to a washing machine that accepts any laundry from a clutter-cleaning robot, washes it properly by color fastness and material, dries it, folds it, and hands it off to a robot that puts it away. Recognizing what's laundry and what isn't and being able to pick it up and sort it is the second hardest part of all of that. The hardest part is the folding.
        • I have a few cleaning robots of various sorts. They're top of the line and incredibly stupid. We are a long way from a robot that can collect clutter, not break or fuck shit up, hand the clothing and nothing else to the washer bot, etc, etc, without putting my ps5 controller through a spin cycle, tossing out my property tax papers as trash or getting stuck hopelessly because a chair moved.

        • by mccalli ( 323026 )
          We've missed a step - ironing. Folding and what have you is fine for T-shirts and the like, but work clothes...I'd love an ironing robot. They don't really exist that I'm aware of, there's ones that approximate it by blowing air at high pressure into mildly damp clothes in order to force out wrinkles through the pressure, but that's not quite the same. They're also very, very expensive.
      • Erm... people who work in commercial laundries? You really need to get out more & learn something about the world.
  • Yes, it's a big thing to sort, but that's far less important. I can sort folded clothes pretty fast. I can't fold them very fast.

    Folding robots aren't unheard of; there was a report from 2022 that The fastest ever laundry-folding robot is here. And it's likely still slower than you [npr.org] and that's fine by me; it can take a few hours as long as it can run unattended. Then again, the "here" part is debatable. The article ends with a section called "It's still a long way from your laundry room" that says "it's no

  • If you're in a job that's being threatened with replacement by automation in the future, get off your ass NOW and look for training in something else. But, no, it's much easier to sit on your ass and yell "they're takin our yobs" now than do anything about it. It's the same as with voter ID (not that I'm for that shit, just using it as an example here) where people had months, if not years to get out and get an ID, but did nothing until it was too late to get one. They then started complaining, saying th

    • >If you're in a job that's being threatened with replacement by automation in the future, get off your ass NOW and look for training in something else. But, no, it's much easier to sit on your ass and yell "they're takin our yobs" now than do anything about it.

      If you're in a job that is essentially repetitive manual labor with navigation and object recognition tasks tacked on... you're unlikely to be retraining for anything that AI replacing you won't already be able to do.

      A humanoid robot that can fold

    • I remember decades ago, people would say "In ten years, you won't be able to get a job without speaking Spanish." Now we have people saying "In ten years, you won't be able to get a job without speaking Mandarin." Of the people who say such things, what percentage do you think were taking language classes?
      • by bjwest ( 14070 )

        I remember decades ago, people would say "In ten years, you won't be able to get a job without speaking Spanish." Now we have people saying "In ten years, you won't be able to get a job without speaking Mandarin." Of the people who say such things, what percentage do you think were taking language classes?

        Yeah, both those sayings were just people spouting racist BS just to be racist assholes, but the automation threat to low to no skill jobs is real, and I think it's a lot closer than ten yeas away.

    • To steal a phrase from Asimov, you're like the guy sitting under a tree when it starts raining. I'm fine, he says. When the rain gets through this one I'll go sit under a different tree.
  • when I can buy a reliable laundry sorting robot.

    We've been seeing demos for fifteen years where it does one out of forty shirts correctly.

    I don't believe this is insurmountable at all, but the premature hype is a waste of everybody's time.

    Keep plugging away for sure until the open problem is solved. Maybe new geometry will come out of the solution.

  • Er, does anyone have any history classes [joysauce.com] anymore?

    400 million for a start up to fold clothes....
    M'kay.

  • Yes, we make robots that can sort potato chips and laundry. How about garbage! How about sorting the trash! That would be useful

  • Was there any point to this other than to use the term "AI"?

    Is there anyone who takes their laundry, sorts it into piles by color, then folds it? Or do you act like a normal human and fold the clothes while you are sorting? I'm not sure anyone would want a "make a laundry pile into 6 laundry piles sorted by color" robot.

    This is clearly a completely failed project - a clothes folding robot which would need to identify the orientation of a crumpled shirt, calculate where to grab the points that will allow gra

  • I can't wait seeing the robot blocked, because it cannot decide if it's Peach vs. Pink, Green vs. Turquoise, or Eggshell vs. Beige, waiting for the fashion police to come help it.

Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code. -- Dave Storer

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