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Comment by periram | Hacker News Reader

Food, laundry and house cleaning: Things that have not kept pace with technological advancements.

I really hope they are successful. The second order effects of this automation, especially for a busy family like ours are hours of saved time, that can be spent with the children.

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Personally I think we'll see these tasks automated after we automate surgery. The value added accomplishing these tasks is low, the cost of robots is high, and the difficulty of a robot doing them is high. It is difficult for robots to manipulate things autonomously, doubly so for flexible objects, and all these tasks require manipulation of flexible objects. Indeed the reason why Creator's robot dispenses burgers in two halves might be that they do not have the manipulation capability to do so. Maneuvering a flexible bun on to a flexible stack of meat and vegetables without damaging the bun or spilling ingredients is very hard. Surgery also involves unstructured inputs and manipulation of flexible objects and manipulation also involves the cutting and sewing of said objects among other things. This makes surgery just as difficult as these tasks, but the value added is much greater. We can now get away with selling a few very expensive robots rather than a large amount of moderately priced ones.

Cleaning the laundry is essentially solved. Folding what's been cleaned is where the gap remains.

Or wrinkle free clothes

This is solved by folding. Or hanging up your clothes.

Agreed! And perhaps very difficult to automate.

There have seen a few prototype solutions on the web but they all were extremely slow ... on the order of 8 hours to fold a load of laundry.

Dryers are so energetically wasteful though, and the advantage to line drying can be low (barring high humidity climate or lack of space). There should be a better solution.

House cleaning is getting pieces mostly solved. I've used a Roomba and now a neato for a few years and the only real improvement I'd want is for the container to get automatically emptied into a larger can so I only have to empty it weekly/monthly

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