Your laundry folding friend

Folding your clothes into organized piles is often laborious, time-consuming, and frustrating. But here comes a machine that can fold your clothes into neat piles in seconds. It’s about two third the size of your washer or dryer, weighs about 60 pounds, and can easily fit into most laundry rooms.

Developed by a San Francisco start-up, Foldimate can start folding clothes as soon as they come out of your washing machine. The commercial version of this laundry-folding machine will be available later this year. Foldimate is Wi-Fi enabled and is expected to cost around $800. Call it a robot or an appliance, Foldimate is an innovative and intriguing discovery.

To get started, you can clip your clothes onto the machine’s horizontal rack and press a button to indicate the cloth type. Foldimate will soon determine the thickness, size, and sleeve length of your clothes, and later adjusts its settings accordingly. You can opt for perfuming and sanitizing if needed. Once it completes folding the entire clothes on the rack, Foldimate soon spits out the folded clothes for you to remove.

According to the makers, Foldimate can fold your laundry perfectly and steam out creases successfully in less than a minute. It can also infuse fragrances into clean and dry clothing. This is possible for towels, shirts, and trousers. The machine takes almost 10 second to fold each item. It takes 20 to 30 seconds for de-wrinkling. Based on thickness of each fabric, Foldimate takes nearly 10 to 30 items per load. In short, you get a trustable and never-complaining friend to fold all the laundry fold you.

Will it be able to solve all your cloth folding woes? No. It won’t be able to automatically fold too small or too large items, or “replace ironing of dress shirts”. This means you will have fold underwear, bed sheets, and socks in the old -fashioned way.

Foldimate is not the only automated folding machine that experts are working on. A Japanese startup has built a similar machine called Laundroid. Laundroid is as big as your refrigerator and costs nearly $2700 USD. In short, it’s both expensive and difficult to handle.

So Foldimate is an affordable and user-friendly choice? Would you love to buy it?

P.S. – No matter what your problem is, someone is readying a solution to cater to your needs. In other words, you can get a solution for something as trivial as folding laundry.

The salad-making robot

When it comes to making salads, the kind of ingredients and toppings used are very important. Or else, a healthy meal might have more calories than a fattening hamburger. What if you can easily measure the amount of calories in the each salad that you choose to have? Does it sound near-to-impossible? Not anymore! A California-based company has developed a food robot that dispenses the quantities of ingredients, and offers details on the precise amount of calories used in each salad. It’s named Sally. In about 60 seconds, the robot can make more than 1000 different types of ready-to-eat salads. Isn’t that awesome? The green-and-brown robot is the brain child of Chowbotics Inc., one among the major companies in the potential million dollar market of food robots.

Why Sally? It’s possibly the “next generation of salad restaurant”, and can make tasty salads faster than humans. Adding more advantage is the feature that helps count the calories in each salad. Moreover, the level of hygiene is matchless when a machine prepares a salad, rather than getting it done by multiple people.

Does that mean the robot doesn’t need any human help? Absolutely not! Here is the human touch in Sally – The food robot doesn’t do all the chores right from start to finish. A human has to slice and fill up the ingredients into the canisters. The ingredients are stored in refrigerated compartments. You can simply place a bowl in the salad dispensing area, and later customize the order from the given menu. Based on calorie count, you can add or remove toppings as required. Once the selection is done, Sally will soon start preparing the salad.

The salad robot comes in compact size, weighs close to 350 pounds, and hardly occupies the same amount of space as that of a small dorm room refrigerator. It uses 21 different ingredients such as kale, romaine, Parmesan, and cherry tomatoes to make appetizing salads in less than a minute, while you can watch the entire process. In its current avatar, Sally is ideal for business settings and not for home kitchens. But after going “on a diet” quite soon, home users too might get a concise version of this remarkable salad making robot.

Will Sally improve its culinary skills? Will it be able to cook some scrumptious ethnic foodstuffs? May be in its next incarnation, if all goes well!