Lots of people do 3-4 loads per week. Some people don't cook at home at all. There are 8 billion people out there.
Folding laundry is not the end goal here. They chose it because it’s a very challenging thing for a robot to do, requiring great manual dexterity, planning, reacting to sensory inputs etc. In other words: if your robot can do your laundry it can probably be taught to do pretty much anything else around the house.
Yes, at least 3x per week. Young kids, toddlers, babies, workout clothes, sports clothes, work clothes, etc.
Because the people on the Axiom are going to need clean jumpsuits?
Seriously, laundry folding is an example of a complex task that requires considerable dexterity and sophisticated object manipulation on the robot's part, but unlike cooking it's relatively low stakes: little harm is likely to be caused to the robot, the environment, or bystanding humans if the robot screws it up. So it makes a pretty good research task that, when solved for, will make impressive demos at trade events.
I can tell you do not have children. We frequently run 2 loads per day...
Also, I challenge anyone to look at that video from 2:00 to 2:45 (which is 90 seconds IRL) and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with "intelligence". I have seen human babies at 5 months old severely outperform this thing.
The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first):
Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.
Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end.
> Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.
Thing is, cooking is something a lot of people find deeply rewarding and humanizing (I don't, but I realize I'm an outlier here). Meanwhile, I challenge you to find anyone who thinks doing laundry is a worthwhile use of their limited time on Earth.
Pretty much this. You’ll be folding clothes while washing more at the same time.
And it isn’t just the folding that is a challenge. It’s putting it away. I’d gladly take a “put the clothes away” robot before I got a “fold the clothes” robot.
This also means I use less floor space as I don't need cabinets/dressers to hold them.
And yes, I have many racks on my walls. The rack life is good.
Instead I would like to see some new innovation in laundry machines. Current technology is very basic, you heat water and keep spinning. Why not some something more similar to bigger paper printer that at the end of the day you feed your 1 shirt, roll it into a roller, sprinkle with some high pressure minimal amount of water, heating and return 30min later already perfectly ironed.