This $7,999 robot will fold (some of) your laundry

If you have a spare $7,999 (plus a $250 deposit), hate folding laundry, and happen to live in the Bay Area, one-and-a-half-year-old startup Weave has the robot for you: Isaac 0.

It takes Isaac 0 around 30-90 minutes to fold a load of laundry, Weave says. That’s all it does — it’s stationary and needs a regular wall outlet — and it can’t tackle large blankets, bed sheets, or inside-out garments. It’s not fully autonomous either, with teleoperators on-hand to assist with trickier folds, though Weave says performance will improve over time.

Weave joins a growing list of companies working to build chore-eliminating robots in the hopes that people will welcome them into their homes. This year’s CES highlighted laundry as the ultimate use case, with demos from LG’s CLOiD and SwitchBot’s Onero H1. Despite the hype, we’re not sure if robots are ready for real homes just yet.