FoldiMate
Everybody likes wearing newly cleaned, ironed, and folded clothes. They smell fresh and feel soft on the skin, but it takes a lot of work. You have to wash everything, then it has to dry, and finally you iron things before folding them before putting them away, which most people hate. Like a lot of people, Gal Rozov hates folding laundry. But, instead of complaining, the software engineer decided to put his computer skills to work and created a laundry-folding robot.
The problem was quite difficult, and he had to do a lot of experiments, but in 2012, after spending two years researching the most efficient design, Rozov moved from Israel to California and set up his FoldiMate factory. It took another four years, but by 2016, he had a working model of a machine which would fold your clothes for you. The washing and drying part had already been solved by other machines, but this was the hardest part.
He showed his invention at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and everybody was amazed at how good it was. The 66-pound robot, which is about 2/3 the size of an average laundry machine, is designed to easily fit above a washer or dryer. In addition to folding, it can also iron and add nice smells to the clean, dry clothing. That means the whole process of changing dirty clothes in beautifully clean and nice-smelling, well-folded clothes can be done by machines.
To get started, the user clips the clothes onto Foldimate’s tray and presses a button to tell the machine the clothing type, such as a pair of trousers, or a shirt. The robot then does its magic. The clothing comes out perfectly flat and in perfect shape. The machine, which, depending on the material’s thickness, can fit between 10 and 30 clothes, takes about 10 seconds to fold each item. That is very fast compared to a normal person who could take a few minutes to do the same job, without the quality this machine gives. I can’t wait to get mine, maybe for Christmas.
The Tribune
1) Why did the inventor create this robot?
