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I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for LG CLOiD as it attempted to fold a series of towels. And I had high hopes for this smart home robot.
The problem is that CLOiD then puts the the towel on the table in a crumpled heap, which would make any homemaker (or actually anyone) cringe.
You see a rep enter the frame to straighten out the towel and move it closer to the robot so that it’s easier to place the next towel on the pile. This proves moderately successful. But then things get worse.
In round 2, CLOiD has more trouble folding the towel and it doesn’t come out straight at all. This takes a minute. For one single towel.
Last but not least, the LG robot gets to work on folding another towel, and it gets through the halfway fold before getting confused or maybe just low on power. It puts its hands down at its sides as if to signal to the world that it’s giving up.
Doing laundry is indeed not easy.
To be fair, it takes a lot of dexterity for a robot to be able to pick up a towel and fold it. And it’s remarkable that CLOiD got it part-way right on a couple of attempts. And there's a lot of technology required to make such a seemingly simple chore possible for a robot.
Each arm has seven degrees of freedom, and each hand includes five independently actuated fingers for fine manipulation. And CLOiD also leverages computer vision and AI for object recognition.
But if LG is promising a “zero labor home" with a combination of AI and robotics, we have a long way to go.
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