Engineers at Tokyo-based company Seven Dreamers started developing a laundry-folding robot called Laundroid in 2005, and now, there is finally a robot to show off at CES 2018. We haven't seen it in person yet, but we spoke with Seven Dreamers CEO Shin Sakane for a preview. The idea is: You drop clean, dry clothes into a box in a pretty home appliance, and then several hours later you can collect the folded, sorted items. "Soft material like clothing is one of the hardest problems for AI even now," Sakane says. "Laundry folding seems like an easy task but it's actually very hard, so that's why no one has ever done it before."

The promising thing about laundry-folding robots is that they target a job that everybody does frequently, and nobody really likes. But to be successful in robotics, especially in consumer robotics, you have to be both affordable and reliable, and robots are, still, generally awful at those things. Laundroid, a robotic system that could ingest wads of laundry and somehow spit out neatly folded clothes, put on a few demos at CES over the past few years, but the Japanese company behind it just announced bankruptcy--probably because the robot didn't work all the time, and would likely have been absurdly expensive. Laundroid may not have been a success, but does that mean that other laundry-folding robots, most notably Foldimate, are doomed as well? The original Laundroid concept was to combine washing clothes, drying clothes, ironing clothes, and folding clothes into one single (magical?)

Dreams of dishing laundry duty to an in-house robot just got a little less hopeful after the company behind the automated assistant, Laundroid, filed for bankruptcy - effectively putting its bot to bed. According to Engadget, the company Seven Dreamers, which has worked to bring Laundroid to market since 2014, still owes 200 creditors about $20 million after its bankruptcy filing in Japan on April 23. In its Consumer Electronic Show (CES) debut in 2017, Seven Dreamers offered up what they purported would be an all-in-one laundry-folding and sorting machine that was able to take laundry, fold it, and in some cases organize it by color or owner and then deliver the final product to its wielder. The days of laundry folding robots got a little less hopeful after the makers of folding and sorting assistant Laundroid filed for bankruptcy. Users were meant to load the machine with clean dry clothes while a robot arm inside folds and sorts them.

Chief executives of highly innovative companies must figure out how to take bold risks while being stable enough to sustain an enterprise over the long term. Achieving this balance is even more difficult in Japan, where lifelong employment is a strong tradition, than elsewhere. Shin Sakane, founder and CEO of the Japanese startup Seven Dreamers Laboratories, has built the company's identity around resolving that conflict. Sakane is a member of a prominent Japanese business family, perhaps best known as the founders and owners of the I.S.T Corporation, a global producer of composite materials made from glass fiber and fluorine resin. After completing a Ph.D. in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Delaware, he returned to Japan in 2000, joining I.S.T as a managing director. He succeeded his father as CEO in 2003. In 2008, I.S.T acquired Super Resin, a company making components for the aerospace, industrial, automotive, and semiconductor industries.

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.

When I heard that not one, but two laundry-folding robots would be on display at the CES tech show in Las Vegas, I initially ignored them. After all, I assumed they were vaporware. Foldimate, whose consumer-focused robot is expected to sell for $980, only had a mockup on display, and customers who order now won't get their robot until late 2019. And, although the $16,000 (!) Laundroid actually folded clothes on the show floor, the refrigerator-sized device was big enough that, theoretically, a human could've been inside doing all the work. It's not that robots will never be folding your laundry.

Then Landroid should do the trick. Created by Japan-based Seven Dreamers, this high-tech robot uses artificial intelligence and a special image processing to identify various items of clothing and then fold them. To be more specific, it boasts multiple robotic arms to pick up the clothes, which are then scanned by cameras, and then transmits the data via WiFi for artificial intelligence to analyze the object, as well as a neural network containing 256,000 images of different clothing items. One caveat: you'll need a few hours for it to finish folding a load of laundry, as one shirt takes about 5 minutes to fold. "Clothing items are analyzed piece by piece in order to relay information to the robot arms, but the machine uses the data of the type, size, and color of the clothing to sort it in different ways.

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 Shin Sakane, CEO Seven Dreamers, which makes the device, 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 may be among the most abhorred household chores. But, the task could soon be a thing of the past – at least, for humans. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, high-tech laundry robots are already beginning to make a buzz, including Seven Dreamers' Laundroid. The firm demonstrated what it claims is the'world's first fully automated laundry folding robot,' revealing it can even distinguish between different types of clothing to find the best folding style. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, high-tech laundry robots are already beginning to make a buzz, including Seven Dreamers' Laundroid.