Hate doing laundry? This is the robot for you

Shares of Panasonic rose as much as 1.9% in Tokyo while the Topix index declined 0.3%

The Japanese inventor received 6 billion yen ($53 million) from partners, including Panasonic, last month to advance “the Laundroid” — a robot Sakane is developing to not only wash and dry garments, but also sort, fold and neatly arrange them. The refrigerator-size device could eventually fill the roles of washing machine, dryer and clothes drawer in people’s homes.

Sakane, whose earlier inventions include an anti-snoring device and golf clubs made of space materials, said the funding will bring closer his dream of liberating humanity from laundry. Among his inspirations for the project is the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Laundroid was designed to resemble the mysterious objects in the film that brought technology to prehistoric humans, and the project was originally code-named “Monolith.”

“That’s what we had in-mind: a technology that never existed on Earth descends from space,” the 45-year-old Sakane, head of Seven Dreamers Laboratories Inc., said in an interview at his Tokyo office. “If we could automate this, the act of doing laundry will be gone for good.”

The funding brings total capital raised to 7.5 billion yen. Nomura Holdings Inc. has been hired for an initial public offering in the “not too distant future,” Sakane said, adding that Seven Dreamers Laboratories is currently valued at about 20 billion yen.

Shares of Panasonic rose as much as 1.9 percent in Tokyo while the Topix index declined 0.3 percent. While the full product is slated for release in 2019, an early version that can only sort and fold clothing goes on sale worldwide in March. Sakane wouldn’t disclose how Laundroid works, but patents show that users dump clothes in a lower drawer and robotic arms grab each item as scanners look for features such as buttons or a collar. 

“We tried so many things and none of them worked,” Sakane said last week. “A ton of team members quit, saying it’s impossible or that I’m crazy. But the ones who remained came up with some truly brilliant ideas.”

The goal is to eventually get the price of the full version to less than about 300,000 yen ($2,700). The model going on sale in March will probably cost significantly more due to higher initial production costs. Panasonic is slated to handle manufacturing.

“We decided that by combining Panasonic’s washing and drying machine technology and 7D’s folding technology, it is possible to bring an all-in-one product to the market early,” said Kyoko Ishii, a spokeswoman for Osaka-based Panasonic.

Users will still have to do some tasks, such as partially buttoning shirts, ensuring clothes aren’t inside out, and bunching socks before putting them inside the machine. That’s because even the best machine-learning applications can’t figure out how to fold a pair of socks.

Each item takes about 10 minutes to fold, which Sakane attributed to the time necessary to scan each part of the clothing and communicate via Wi-Fi with a central server. He is working to get it down to 3-to-5 minutes, but said the robot was designed to be used passively while users are doing something else or out of the house.