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AI-guided robots are ready to sort recyclables
- darepublic 4y agoI worked at a mid sized startup where this idea was floated for developing a prototype. Neat to see it has become production level software somewhere
- ackbar03 4y agoI don't think this is a particularly complicated idea actually. Why didnt you guys pursue it at the time?
- darepublic 4y agoML was not the focus of the company, we didn't really have any qualified devs to pull off a project like that. It became a prototype for a sales pitch and I don't know what happened to it after. Though I disagree about it not being a complicated/difficult endeavour.
- geuis 4y agoI wish articles like this would just get to the point. We don't need yet another explanation of how recycling works, how it has low recovery rates, etc. Given the audience, take it as a given the reader has the basics down. Further down the author finally starts to talk about their topic (trash picking robots), but then digresses yet again. It's a really terrible writing style. State what your topic is up front with a brief high level, then you can mix in some more background while expanding on the details further below.
- swayvil 4y agoIf you want to be taken seriously you need to pad everything out to 40 paragraphs. It's some kind of unwritten rule of the internet. Literally. They even have bots that cull succinctity or label it trolly. It's psychotic.
- geuis 4y agoI remember in high school reading a Tale of Two cities. Absolutely disliked how all the language is over dramatic and flowery. Try reading some scientific papers from the same era. Many of them are similar in how they were written. Then sometime after I read something by Mark Twain for the first time. I was blown away at how much easier and more enjoyable his writing style was.
- langsoul-com 4y agoYou might enjoy Derrick Sivers articles then. He goes out of his way to make everything short and concise.
- myself248 4y agoHi, here's my life story. [14 paragraphs of crap] Ingredients list. Recipe. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
- ljlolel 4y agoYou all would enjoy the density of Twitter more
- sschueller 4y agoWhat I find sad is to see startups here in Switzerland where we already separate and recycle extensively that offer a service where you just toss everything that can be recycled in the same bag. So batteries are mixed with plastic and cans. These bags compete with government collection facilities and are "reprogramming" people to be lazy. Regular trash is very expensive here and people who want to safe are forced to separate and recycle what can be. The hardest task of recycling is the separation of items. Centralizing this does not scale as you need to hire more and more underpaid worked to do this task. The task that was done for free before by the person throwing the item out. All the facilities had to do is sort the remaining small percentage of miss sorted items instead of all items.
- quotemstr 4y agoDoes sorting done by the general public count as "free"? It takes time and effort to route garbage to the appropriate bin --- maybe not much, but it adds up over the whole population. The desire to avoid this effort doesn't strike me as "lazy" any more than hiring a housekeeper or landscaper is "lazy". Economies of scale and division of labor make our society more prosperous. Why shouldn't we apply these principles to trash disposal and recycling?
- sschueller 4y agoIt does not scale (at least not yet with current AI). It does cost everyone a bit of time but it also depends on you and how much trash you generate. Recycling is for the benefit of all of us and we should all do our part irregardless if a CEO or a house cleaner.
- losteric 4y agoFrom an efficiency perspective, it seems "cheaper" to presort each item upon ingestion rather than mixing everything up and sorting later. For most people, placing an item in the right bin is a subconscious action on "autopilot".
- lttlrck 4y agoIt's not noticeably more difficult to drop an item in 1 of 4 bins vs 1 - and it reduces spoilage.
- morcheeba 4y agoA friend of mine worked at this company, and the bane of his existence was one popular Arizona green tea bottle. The plastic and glass versions looked identical[1], so no way to sort it visually. Great for brand identity, bad downstream. [1] https://www.plasticstoday.com/packaging/arizona-beverages-swaps-out-glass-bottles-pet https://www.plasticstoday.com/packaging/arizona-beverages-sw...
- darkerside 4y agoI wonder if echolocation could have done the trick
- swayvil 4y agoSeriously. Give that robot some more senses. Echoic, magnetic, infra-ultra, spectrographic analytic, nuclear magnetic resonant... the whole schmeer. It's certainly easier than making them smarter.
- KMag 4y agoI think the normal thing is to drop trash down a tower with a forced air cross-current. Glass gets diverted less than plastic by the cross-current. You can also use various densities of liquid, to catch different densities of plastic floating vs. sinking if you've already crushed things up to avoid air bubbles. However, then you need to later separate the liquid from the shredded garbage.
- epicureanideal 4y agoI suppose a law could be passed that versions of a product with different materials would need to be visually distinct? Or manufacturers could voluntarily do it.
- divbzero 4y agoDid your friend eventually find a workable solution? I wonder if they could reach out to the beverage company and ask for a distinguishing feature that’s easy to recognize for computer vision but wouldn’t affect the brand’s look-and-feel for human vision. Perhaps a machine readable version of a resin identification code [1] encoded as a pattern visible from any angle? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 4y agoGOOD Point by my wife! Why can’t we have a blower on a belt to accomplish most of the sorting? Plastics blow one way and glass stays on the belt. Throw in a magnet and make eddy currents to trap metals.
- hinkley 4y agoThey do use eddy currents for metal sorting. Take some of your home recycling to a recycler instead of leaving it on the bin. It's worth going once just to see the small scale solution. Get yourself a bag of soda cans and throw a couple soup cans in there. Not the cleanest place you'll ever be, so don't wear your nice shoes and prep for some odors, but better than some. When I was a child I saw one system that expected all aluminum that just used an electromagnet to lift any steel out of the stream. That was quite a ways up in the air so I suspect the owner would have gotten pretty pissed if we threw a bunch of nails or soup cans in the bag for fun. But most of the other ones I've seen have two conveyors with a gap, and they use an AC magnet to fling the aluminum onto the second conveyor (via eddy currents). Most of the ferrous stuff just drops into the first bin, or funnels off to be sorted again. For your plastic or glass suggestion, that may take breaking it up first, since large items might not lift or go in weird directions. And then some plastics are pretty dense. I have the vaguest notion that I might have seen a system that sorts plastic from glass while washing it, since the glass sinks and some plastics don't, but that could have been a prototype or a misfiring neuron for all I can remember.
- IHLayman 4y agoI think it is harder than just blowing them with air… different plastics have to be recycled in different ways. The number in the recycle arrows tells you what it is and how (or if) you can recycle it (see https://www.thoughtco.com/recycling-different-types-of-plastic-1203667 https://www.thoughtco.com/recycling-different-types-of-plast...). I don’t believe these plastics can be sorted by density or level of wind resistance.
- hedora 4y agoHere's an idea: Charge product manufacturers enough tax to get recycling of their packaging to 95%. Aluminum and clear glass would immediately become more popular (they are mechanically sortable). I'm guessing the manufacturers would quickly standardize on a small number of plastics for everything else.
- deelowe 4y agoAnd the price of everything would go up in response. probably not politically feasible in this climate.
- gnopgnip 4y agoIf externalities are being priced in, overall costs would go down. They are only cheap now because someone else pays that cost
- pindab0ter 4y agoThat doesn’t change the fact that you’ll pay more at the till, which is where vulnerable people will feel it most.
- deelowe 4y agoThere is no way to fully price in externalities. This problem is similar to measuring the length of a shoreline. The closer you look, the more externalities you’ll find.
- langsoul-com 4y agoI wonder, if the AI could identify recyclable items, then just lighting up items so humans could sort would be eaiser. Lights and hands cost way less than complicated grip machines.
- bergenty 4y agoWhy? Make the investment at centralized locations. No human should have to do a mind numbing job like that. Can’t even relax, it will be stressful too.
- evanthayer 4y agoThis is a solution without a problem? The global recycling industry has collapsed. It never broke 10% btw, and is currently at 4%. China doesn’t want our trash anymore. No one is buying, regardless of marginal cost.
- bergenty 4y agoSorting has always been our worst enemy. We can’t recycle everything but can recycle a lot of materials really, really well.
- ycombiredd 4y agoI’ve been automating processes and systems (with software, not robotics) since my early days as a sysadmin. I would later mentor many juniors over the years and was often challenged by them about how good for our careers doing such a thing was. I would always respond that I felt our jobs were to try to automate ourselves out of being necessary, because then we could move on to bigger more challenging problems, now that we had gotten common repeatable issues out of the way. “There will always be bigger, better work for those with the skills required to automate their jobs out of existence”, I would tell them. Now 25 years later I find myself saying similar things when discussing the topic with people who fear automation displacing workers, and my initial response to this article was much the same. Then, a memory of a commercial I used to see as a kid popped into my head and for the first and only time I’ve felt myself being pulled to an anti-automation sentiment - and this is an isolated use case of automation I am feeling this way about, and it is all because of this commercial that apparently still occupies a place in my mind probably 40 years since it aired. https://youtu.be/CSiz6kbIZkw https://youtu.be/CSiz6kbIZkw
- adrianN 4y agoIt's only a matter of time until automation replaces humans with normal IQ in a way that they're permanently out of jobs.
- throwaway473825 4y agoSo far automation has only created more jobs. Why would this suddenly change?
- langitbiru 4y ago"No model, regardless of size, outperformed the best-performing human on any task. However, for some tasks, the best-performing model beat the average human." https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/ https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/ To be fair, it's hard to predict the future.
- ycombiredd 4y ago
- karmasimida 4y agoIs the use of AI necessarily reducing the, say the carbon footprint though?
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoOur world will so quickly come to resemble the fantasies of Star Wars etc. With multi-armed intelligent robots sorting recyclables, perhaps in the bowels of Jawa scavenger ships...