Basic Idea

The idea for the laundry room is very similar to that for the kitchen: The kitchen should do the cooking; the laundry room should do the laundry.

As I discussed when I was talking about the general layout of the house, the master bedroom will be directly over the laundry room, so there can be a laundry shoot between the two. As clothing falls through the laundry shoot, it will need to be sorted into lights and darks. This probably means the user will only be able to input one article of clothing at a time, at least initially.

(Okay, well, that's really like step twenty. Very initially, the user will tell the laundry shoot whether a piece of clothing is light or dark and the shoot will hopefully do the right thing with it, but I'm talking somewhat longer-term here.)

In the laundry room will be two washer-dryers, one for lights, one for darks, and the shoot will deposit the clothing accordingly. The washer-dryers will have some way of sensing when they are full and then they will automatically add soap and do their thing.

So far, none of this is too terribly difficult. I mean, I don't know exactly how I'm going to do it, and implementation's always really hard, but conceptually it seems possible. I mean, there's some special cases to deal with--delicates and clothes that can't go in the dryer, detecting I'm out of detergent, dealing with clothing that's part light, part dark (although I, as a person, don't know what to do about that, so I'm sure whatever the laundry room comes up with will be fine), etc. But none of this seems impossible.

Then, there's folding.

Folding laundry is actually an incredibly complicated task. Think about it. There's really quite a bit of intelligence and a pretty wide range of motion required to untangle, classify, and properly put away dry laundry. Now, the laundry room must be able to do this task. I hate folding laundry with a passion that is entirely out of proportion to the actual, objective unpleasantness of the task. I am very seriously tempted to just have a clean clothes basket and a dirty clothes basket and call it good, but my mother raised me better than that, so I'm really stuck until I can figure out how to make a robot do this for me, but...I got nothing.

I considered putting small magnets in my clothes so the clothes folding robot could just align magnets on the clothes with magnets on the hangers, but then I actually thought for two seconds about what would happen if you put a big bundle of magnetized clothes in a metal washer, so there goes that idea.

A friend recently suggested having each article of clothing put into a lingerie bag as it was sorted. This idea may have some promise. It gets rid of the tangled mess problem and mitigates the identification problem as each item could probably be identified by weight. Unfortunately it does not address the actual folding of the clothes.

I've also thought about just having very generic hooks or clamps that can hang the laundry up without being particular about sorting pants from shirts or getting them oriented in a reasonable way. This might work, but seems very much a third-best kind of solution.

Suggestions welcome!

(And don't say "hire a maid"! a) It would not be as fun and b) I feel a little uncomfortable having people wait on me. No. It must be robots. I am much more comfortable around robots.)