LAS VEGAS—Finally. While we've mastered machine washing laundry for nearly a century, folding is another matter. And as my wrinkled shirts and hotel-room ironing board will tell you here at CES, folding matters.

At CES today I got to see the Laundroid, the world's first laundry-folding robot. The makers, Japan-based Seven Dreamers, actually thought this through. Laundroid is about the size of a refrigerator; you throw your crumpled clothes in a bottom bin like a pull-out freezer, and they're moved up to shelves neatly folded. The robot uses image-recognition algorithms to tell what kind of clothing it's handling and to fold it appropriately, Seven Dreamers CEO Shin Sakane said. It takes between 3-10 minutes to fold one piece of laundry at the moment.

The Laundroid here is just a model, alas. The company has been working on it for 10 years. Seven Dreamers will have a working model at CES in 2017, has a deal to potentially start including it with Panasonic washers and dryers in 2018, and may build it into new homes in Japan by 2020, Sakane said.

The company did show some of its folded clothes. They aren't 100 percent neat, but they're folded, by machine.

The Laundroid will come to the U.S., Sakane said, athough he didn't want to give a date or a price. When I suggested "thousands of dollars," he winced a little and agreed that yes, it'll be a luxury product initially, perhaps for people who can afford staff to fold their laundry right now. But down the road, Laundroid may free us all from the painfully dull task of folding.