Why home robots are starting with your laundry pile

Before a robot can vacuum your living room, it has to fold your socks. That is the bet behind a cluster of well-funded robotics startups that have raised billions of dollars to solve a problem roboticists have chased for decades.

Figure AI, Sunday Robotics, and Weave Robotics have all shown off machines that can pick up a crumpled T-shirt, identify the sleeves, and fold it into a neat rectangle. The task is a proving ground for the broader promise of home robots, investors and engineers say. If a machine can handle laundry, it can probably handle most other household chores.

"This is one of the most challenging dexterous manipulation tasks for a humanoid robot," Figure wrote in a blog post last year.

Roboticists describe laundry as a "holy grail" because clothes are deformable objects – they bunch, fold, and wrinkle in ways a rigid gripper cannot predict. A robot must learn to handle fabric with enough precision to fold it well, but without damaging it. The difficulty showcases a machine's intelligence and physical control, said Ayanna Howard, a roboticist and president of Spelman College.

Yet when a robot fails, the stakes are low. "If you drop a piece of clothing, it's not going to break," Howard said.

Sunday CEO Tony Zhao told Business Insider that the company chose laundry partly because it "looks for hard things to do."

The robotics industry has been through laundry hype cycles before. Laundroid, a Japanese company behind a $16,000 laundry-folding robot, filed for bankruptcy in 2019. FoldiMate made repeated appearances at the Consumer Electronics Show in the late 2010s but never shipped a product. High costs and poor reliability undid those earlier efforts.

Today's startups say advances in artificial intelligence, cheaper hardware, and a flood of talent and capital into physical AI will make this generation different – and capable of doing far more than folding clothes.

"For the longest time, the technology just wasn't there," Weave Robotics CEO Kaan Dogrusoz told Business Insider. "But then, everything changed."

That claim is about to be tested outside the lab. The latest robots are expensive, and their reliability in real homes remains unknown because few have been deployed. Sunday plans to place its robot in homes through a beta program this fall. Weave and 1X expect to begin delivering robots to customers later this year.

Why laundry, not the living room

Robotics companies are starting with laundry because it is a bounded task inside the home – a notoriously difficult environment for robots. Most machines operate in controlled settings such as factories and warehouses, where their surroundings and movements can be tightly defined. They are often separated from people for safety.

The economics of a robot that folds socks

Teaching a robot to fold laundry is one thing. Convincing people to pay thousands of dollars for it is another. Weave's Isaac costs $8,000 upfront, or $449 a month through a subscription. For most households, it would likely be cheaper to outsource the chore to a laundromat or a person. Or, as Howard put it: "That's what kids are for."

For these robots to make economic sense, they need to do far more than fold clothes. Sunday's AI system is learning chores including vacuuming, organizing toys, fastening zippers, and making coffee. 1X is marketing its humanoid robot NEO as a personal housekeeper capable of folding laundry, organizing shelves, and tidying rooms. Weave declined to say which task it is tackling next.

Howard said consumers are unlikely to seriously consider buying a home robot until it can perform enough useful tasks to justify its price, like heating dinner before its owner gets home, mowing the lawn, or cleaning the pool. The challenge will be building a single robot that can do all of these things.

Jason Corso, a robotics professor at the University of Michigan, said companies are "stuck in an appliance mindset," building robots around individual chores rather than machines that can understand context and adapt to people's needs.

The data flywheel

For many of these companies, getting robots into homes to fold laundry is also the start of what they hope will become an expanding data flywheel. Robotics startups are scrambling for real-world data needed to train the "brains" of their machines. While large language models are trained on internet text, there is no comparable dataset for the physical world.

Sunday, for example, trains its AI models on people doing everyday tasks in $200 sensor-equipped gloves that mirror its robots' hands. The most valuable data – the kind that could help companies truly master laundry and expand into other tasks – may come from the robots themselves as they encounter the countless edge cases of real homes.

A truly general-purpose home robot – the robot butler Silicon Valley has long promised – is still many years away, Corso said.

Why home robots are starting with your laundry pile

Why laundry, not the living room

The economics of a robot that folds socks

The data flywheel

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