There are at least two companies out there that can fold some laundry in a controlled environment already. At this point it's just a matter of categorizing fabrics and shapes and expanding that knowledge. Two years at the outside until it can fold 80% of your laundry.
Totally agree but the idea is this gives you a teleoperation environment that is truly on policy and not some artificial lab. The idea is that these robots, like those Amazon stores, are predominantly just controlled by actual humans.
Hey I totally agree I do not want a teleoperator looking into my house, it’s just so deliciously tempting to get in home on policy data. Not sure the reason why they are super interested in home environments vs business or public spaces.
This is basically a solved problem. Humans have latency, more than your Internet connection. We predict what's going to happen based on the shapes we see. Computer vision and LBMs do the same thing.
moving a soft object from a to b is doable, folding/separating/sorting at any kind of speed is very much an area of active research.