Why It’s Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry By Alexandra Ossola
CLICK FOR NEAT GIF!But if we do, the machines will finally be able to kill the whole human race.
I’ve been doing laundry every week for almost a decade, and by now the process is so familiar that I can practically do it in my sleep: Bring the hamper to the laundry room, separate the whites and colors, load the washing machines with clothes and detergent, transfer the washed clothes to the dryer, take them out of the dryer and put them into the basket, fold the clean clothes, and file them into the appropriate drawer. For me and most other experienced launderers, it’s fairly automatic.
But for a robot, doing laundry is a nightmare. Robots work best with repeated tasks that have a finite number of steps and motions, such as putting together a car. The programs that control those robots’ actions rely upon simple “if this, then that” logic — if you pull the handle, the door opens, and you can move on to the next task. But what happens if you pull the handle and the door doesn’t open? A robot programmed to do laundry is faced with 14 distinct tasks, but the most washbots right now can only complete about half of them in a sequence. But to even get to that point, there are an inestimable number of ways each task can vary or go wrong — infinite doors that may or may not open.
Here’s what a robot has to do.
- Find the pile of dirty laundry, distinguishing it from other clutter that might be in the room.
- Pick up each item in the pile. (Uncertainty: it’s unclear how many objects the robot will have to pick up.)
- Put each item in a laundry basket.
- Navigate to the washing machine. (Because of where the robot has to hold the laundry basket, it can obstruct some of the its sensors which means it receives less information and cannot adjust its movements as precisely.)
- Depending on the type of machine, pull or lift the door to open it.
- Transfer clothes into the machine.
- Add detergent and/or fabric softener.
- Close the washing machine door.
- Choose the appropriate wash cycle (Delicate, Permanent Press, Heavy Duty) and start the wash.
- Remove the clothes from the washing machine and transfer to the dryer. (Uncertainty: the robot doesn’t know beforehand how many times it will need to reach in, grab the clothes, and remove them in order to get them all.)
- Choose the type of drying cycle and start it.
- Remove clothing from the dryer. (Uncertainty: how many times will it have to grab the clothes to get them out? Is there a sock still clinging to the inside of the machine?)
- Fold items depending on the type of apparel.
- Puts garments away in a dresser or closet.
When a robot is faced with a situation it’s not programmed to handle, it just sits idly trying to figure out what to do next. And while long pauses might be fine for laundry, it won’t work so well for future robots, which may be driving us around or bringing files to doctors in hospitals.
Programmers and artificial intelligence experts have spent decades designing increasingly sophisticated robots that can navigate these unpredictable situations, tweaking the software and smoothing the physical movements so that the robot can behave more like a human when faced with uncertainty. Some robotics experts are designing robots with sensors that can learn every time they move. Others are literally teaching their creations to complete certain tasks by reading the instruction manual.
Doing laundry is one big, uncertain step towards a future where robots can handle uncertainty like humans. It’s a sample problem, a case study; if robots can do laundry, there’s no telling what sorts of other tasks they will be able to accomplish autonomously, from driving cars to exploring distant planets. The field of robotics is now at a pivotal point—decades of improvements mean that robots can start interacting with the world in ways only imagined in science fiction, and with no input from humans.
https://medium.com/matter/why-it-s-almost-impossible-to-teach-a-robot-to-do-your-laundry-2a4a3efb3775
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SheilaT
(23,156 posts)steps can be minimized by having the humans pre-sort the clothing. Back when I was married with two kids at home, we did that. There were three laundry bins in the upper hallway: colors, whites, sheets/towels. Of course, the post-drying folding and returning to the correct place would probably be beyond a robot, if different people's clothing were intermingled. Heck, my two sons were four years apart in age and I still sometimes confuse which item belonged to which boy.
Oh, and if the washer and drier were themselves re-designed, so that the basket that held the clothing to wash it went directly into the drier, that would solve the problem of the robot not being able to know how many times it would need to reach into the washer to transfer clothes to the drier. And then, at the end it would simply need to figure out how to fold the clothes.
However, aren't there machines that wash and dry all in one?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Robots will never replace mothers/wives/women.
I don't know whether to be happy or sad about that.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)Step 4 has some naive notions. A robot can and would have sensors where ever needed. Vision sensors in its hands and legs would not get obstructed by a basket of clothes.
Not all laundry is washed by women, to think so is quite sexist.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)
Nitram
(22,843 posts)...that would be difficult for a robot would be locating dirty laundry. Easily solved by putting dirty laundry in a designated receptacle. Perhaps a sensor could be installed to help a robot distinguish clean clothes from dirty by smell. Or by the presence of epithelial cells and hairs. This would also enable robot to distinguish clothes belonging to different people.
Perhaps a more difficult task would be ascertaining which clothes require special treatment - wool, silk, delicate, etc. This could be accomplished by having the robot scan the clothing tags. If such robots came into common use a bar code could be added to clothing tags for this purpose.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)Robot cars are already a reality and are only going to get better, the potential for death and injury from mistakes in driving is far higher than doing laundry.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The skill level of the population, and therefore its brain/motor capacity will be greatly diminished.
And Robot cars are terrifying. A subtle form of fascism.
http://singularityhub.com/2015/03/08/can-we-trust-robot-cars-to-make-hard-choices/
The ethics of robot cars has been a hot topic recently. In particular, if a robot car encounters a situation where it is forced to hit one person or another—which should it choose and how does it make that choice? It's a modern version of the trolley problem, which many have studied in introductory philosophy classes.
Imagine a robot car is driving along when two people run out onto the road, and the car cannot avoid hitting one or the other. Assume neither person can get away, and the car cannot detect them in advance. Various thinkers have suggested how to make an ethical decision about who the car should hit:
The robot car could run code to make a random decision.
The robot car could hand off control to a human passenger.
The robot car could make a decision based on a set of pre-programmed values by the car’s designers or a set of values programmed by the owner.
The last of these deserves a little more detail. What would these values be like?
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)At least the robot car will make a decision, half the drivers here would be looking at their cell phones or their radio or gps and never notice the persons running into the road.
We already entrust our lives on the road to far simpler robots, traffic lights, we depend on them to stop the traffic in one direction while letting it flow in the other, they do not always do that.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Literally
And you wait, they will try to make robot cars compulsory.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)Most rational people will realize that humans aren't very good drivers after all and it would be better if they weren't doing the driving.
I'm actually something of a driving enthusiast and have had a number of higher than average performance cars in my life, I also know a good bit more about cars and the physics of how they work than the average driver. I for one will be sorry to see driving as a form of entertainment go away but the cost in human death and misery is too high.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)Probably will have to anyway, but not yet. I did take the old farts driving course, which was helpful, but depressing because I know in the long run now it's all decay and death.
But, it is way overrated as a way to spend time, cars and driving. Now the big deal is being in touch all the time, PDAs and smart phones and stuff. Soon that will be boring and unimaginative too, like sitting in a car for hours doing nothing but look at reality go by outside.
As it is, there is not a decent alternative, and your social status will be adjusted downwards too, and low social status can get you in all sorts of trouble in the land of the free.
