Clothes-folding robot joins San Francisco laundry business’s workforce
By Itay Hod
On a typical day, Phillip Sharrette, a laundry worker, handles hundreds of pounds of clothes.
“The longest and most tedious part is folding the actual articles of clothing,” he said.
But on this particular morning, he was able to take a load off with a helping hand straight out of a sci-fi movie. Working alongside him was “Isaac,” a robot equipped with cameras and sensors that could sort, fold, and stack piles of clothes with surprising precision.
“It still blows my mind that every day I wake up and go to work with a robot,” Sharrette said.
Sharrette works for Tumble, a San Francisco-based laundry service, and he said Isaac was a bit slow, about two minutes per item, but, according to Sharrette, it is still learning. As Sharrette and Isaac worked, a steady stream of people peered through the window, many of them taking pictures.
“He’s become a celebrity in his own right,” Sharrette joked.
Scott Patterson, Tumble’s CEO, said Isaac was cutting down the time it took to do laundry, and that in the near future, it would allow the company to reduce the price for a single bag.
“I would love to get it down to $35 a bag instead of $55 a bag,” he said.
Justin Kyle Yip, owner of Seabreeze Cleaners, said that ever since Isaac started, business had gone up by 10 to 15%.
“He draws a lot of curiosity from the customers passing by and the neighbors,” he said.
Isaac wasn’t the only one stepping into households. Neo, a humanoid developed by Palo Alto startup 1X, is set to hit the market in 2026. Designed to vacuum, water plants, and tidy up spaces, Neo can perform some chores on its own, though many tasks still require remote guidance from a human.
Automated helpers are becoming more common, with the global household robot market expected to grow from $12 billion in 2024 to $71 billion by 2034, according to Precedence Research.
Kaan Dogruzos, co-founder of Weave Robotics, the company behind Isaac said domestic robots are giving people something money can’t buy: freedom.
“We want to make sure that people don’t have to spend time doing things they don’t want to do,” he said.
The price tag for these robots can run tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the model.
