LG's CLOiD robot can fold laundry and serve food very slowly LG's vision for a zero labor home feels more aspirational than actually possible. When LG announced that it would demo a laundry-folding, chore-doing robot at CES 2026, I was immediately intrigued. For years, I've wandered the Las Vegas Convention Center halls and wondered when someone might create a robot that can tackle the mundane but useful tasks I despise like folding laundry. With CLOiD (pronounced like Floyd), LG has proven that this is theoretically possible, but probably not likely to happen any time soon. I went to the company's CES booth to watch its demonstration of CLOiD's abilities, which also include serving food, fetching objects and fitness coaching. During a very carefully choreographed 15-minute presentation, I watched CLOiD grab a carton of milk out of the fridge, put a croissant in an oven, sort and fold some laundry and grab a set of keys off a couch and hand them to the human presenter.

We were trying to get in touch with our internet service provider. I can't remember the reason. But we contacted the company through its website chat system. My partner was typing, and I noticed his language was unusually clipped, devoid of the words "please", or "thank you". "You don't have to be so rude," I said.

I was standing off to the side of the showroom at CES while engineers worked in hushed voices, fussing over a $16,000 artificial intelligence-powered laundry-folding machine. The machine wasn't giving back the T-shirt I put in, and for one brief, terrifying second, I really thought I broke it. I had brought my own Verge T-shirt to try out a prototype of Laundroid, and I had to coax Seven Dreamers CEO Shin Sakane into letting me drop my shirt in, instead of the demo shirts they had prepared. As he expected, it didn't work. After about 15 minutes, the Laundroid opened up to reveal nothing but an empty drawer.

I was standing off to the side of the showroom at CES while engineers worked in hushed voices, fussing over a $16,000 artificial intelligence-powered laundry-folding machine. The machine wasn't giving back the T-shirt I put in, and for one brief, terrifying second, I really thought I broke it. I had brought my own Verge T-shirt to try out a prototype of Laundroid, and I had to coax Seven Dreamers CEO Shin Sakane into letting me drop my shirt in, instead of the demo shirts they had prepared. As he expected, it didn't work. After about 15 minutes, the Laundroid opened up to reveal nothing but an empty drawer.

Folding laundry, it turns out, is really hard to automate. Researchers from the UK, Czech Republic and Greece have used this seemingly simple task to extend the limits of machine learning and robotics. Andreas Doumanoglou, a PhD Student at Imperial College London, and his team programmed a two-armed robot to identify and fold laundry through a series of steps, each one with it's own challenges.

We keep hearing about advances in artificial intelligence and the coming apocalypse as foreseen in the Terminator movies. But not all AI is created equal, and some will be squarely focused on doing one task really well. In the case of the /laundroid1, terrible name aside, that task is folding your laundry. Everyone hates folding their laundry, but it's a mandatory task if you don't want clean clothes that require a hot iron to get the creases out. If there was a machine that could do the folding for you, though?