Is There a Future for Laundry-Folding Robots?

The promising thing about laundry-folding robots is that they target a job that everybody does frequently, and nobody really likes. But to be successful in robotics, especially in consumer robotics, you have to be both affordable and reliable, and robots are, still, generally awful at those things. Laundroid, a robotic system that could ingest wads of laundry and somehow spit out neatly folded clothes, put on a few demos at CES over the past few years, but the Japanese company behind it just announced bankruptcy—probably because the robot didn’t work all the time, and would likely have been absurdly expensive.

Laundroid may not have been a success, but does that mean that other laundry-folding robots, most notably Foldimate, are doomed as well? Of course it doesn’t, although I’m not particularly optimistic.