The race to create the holy grail of domestic robots: a laundry-folding machine

Soon, evenings and weekends spent folding laundry could be a thing of the past. Laundroid, a sleek refrigerator-sized machine developed by Japanese company Seven Dreamers, has been designed to relieve you of one the more mundane domestic chores. Users dump their unsorted clothes into a pull-out drawer near the base. Inside, a robot picks up each item of clothing, uses a combination of image analysis and artificial intelligence to figure out what it is--a shirt, a skirt, pants--and then folds it accordingly. It's not the only robot that wants to join your laundry room.