At Last, There’s a Robot That Will Do Your Laundry [VIDEO]
Doing the laundry is one of those tasks that never ends. As long as you wear clothes, you will get them dirty and, thus, need to wash them.
Unless you're doing well enough to hire a full-time maid. And if you're even richer, you could just throw out whatever you wore once it gets dirty. Or join a nudist colony. But short of those increasingly extreme steps, washing, drying and folding your clothes will remain a part of your life for the foreseeable future.
Or maybe not! The geniuses at Willow Garage created the PR2 robot a few years ago, and recently they released video showing the PR2 successfully picking up dirty laundry, placing it in a laundry basket, then putting the dirty items into a washing machine. It's not perfect yet, but it's an impressive step on the road to laundry liberation.
Here's a clip of the PR2 folding a pair of pants:
And for a much more thorough breakdown of the PR2's laundry-doing progress, check out IEEE Spectrum.