FoldiMate's Laundry-Folding Robot (Photo : Facebook )
A laundry-folding robot that can finish the household chore is set to launch in 2018. FoldiMate is a California startup that has plans to sell a home robot that folds, presses, perfumes, and sanitizes laundry in under one minute. The new machine can fold clothes such as shirts and pants twice as fast as a human could, and will have a price tag between $700 and $850.
A commercial claims the new robot will be able to "de-wrinkle" dress shirts and pants using steam. It will also add a good smell to the clothes as it does its repetitious work.
The first ad for the robotic laundry folder was posted on YouTube less than one month ago. Since then it has racked up almost 2 million views and nearly 2,000 Likes, according to New York Daily News.
FoldiMate's website also stated that almost 60,000 people have signed up to be informed when pre-orders for the futuristic robot will start. That was as of June 7, Tuesday.
The device was developed by many scientists and robotic engineers. They shared they plan to start taking pre-orders sometime next year, and to ship the first units in 2018.
A commercial version of the robotic helper has been on the market since 2014.
The United Kingdom newspaper The Telegraph took a poll that asked readers if they would pay £600 ($870) so they would never have to fold clean laundry again. Up to now 84 percent of the respondents picked the answer "...take my money," according to Quartz.
FoldiMate CEO Gal Rozov told US Weekly the response to the new robot has been amazing. He shared that some comments on social networks show that that people are very excited about the laundry-folding robot.
However, not all reactions to FoldiMate's robot have been positive. It has been criticized as being over-priced, and doing tasks that lazy people are not willing to do.
TheNextWeb also argued the robot has several problems. For example, each item has to be clipped one-by-one, and the machine cannot fold large pieces such as bed sheets.
Laundroid is a similar laundry-folding machine. After people dump their clothes into the unit it folds them within several hours, but has problems with socks.
