6 ms·

In NYC Rsosevelt Island solved their trash problems (which plague the rest of the city) with an underground pneumatic trash network: https://www.atlasobscura.co

by hnbear 2y ago

In NYC Rsosevelt Island solved their trash problems (which plague the rest of the city) with an underground pneumatic trash network: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/suck-it-roosevelt-island-s-pneumatic-trash https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/suck-it-roosevelt-isla... Buildings have a connection into which trash is sucked away to the central yard for processing. It's pretty neat and helps keep the island tidy. You don't get any of the normal huge trash piles that litter Manhattan on trash day. Conversely, our local hospital is now using robots for deliveries. They trundle around and deliver things like meds to the nurses stations on request, and announce it with "Your delivery has arrived". Just watching robots trundle around as though it's normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. Now our local supermarkets (BJs and Stop and Shop) have robots that trundle around checking inventory as well.

fusslo 2y ago
my office adjoins a factory where we produce what we engineer in the offices. The factory has two or maybe three different types of robots delivering all sorts of things from packages to packaging to stainless steel bar. the robots use the same walkways as the humans. It seems more and more we are designing robots to occupy and utilize the same spaces as humans. And we're designing the robots to make the humans give way: they're slow, large, bulky, and just stop when confronted. I think it's because humans are a much better robot. humans (generally, of course) are more agile, can route easily, and move our bodies in unexpected ways to accomplish the task (lift a box up from waist height over an obstacle for example) though I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot in my local stop & shop
- hnbear 2y ago
  > the robots use the same walkways as the humans. How much of this is that the robots are far newer than the buildings? How soon till new buildings are designed with designated robotic paths? Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    It will be much cheaper, and not that hard to make the robots super safe and considerate.
    - ssrc 2y ago
      And then we send them to Jupiter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    We do that all the time, we just don't usually consider them to be robots. Car factories have all kinds of vehicles transporting car parts along tracks, ceiling mounted rails, etc. Nobody bats an eye about that. If you squint hard enough elevators are a kind of robot on a designated pathway. But to be called a robot it has to have some human-like (or at least animal-like) quality. Which usually involves either imitating human arms (e.g. typical industrial robot arms), imitating human movement (e.g. Boston dynamics) or using infrastructure designed for humans. If you put a delivery robot on a purpose-built path it has none of those qualities and reverts back to being a normal machine.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations. For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes. What's the problem supposed to be with running cables through clips on the wall? That you'll know they're there? That you can easily access them?
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      > For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes. Install flexible plastic tubes instead and you can just pull out cables when you need to replace them for whatever reason.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  >> I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot I ran into one of these things late one night after checking into a hotel. Dead tired, I got off the elevator and was walking down the hall when this 3-foot high dalek started following me. "Can I get you some towels?" I retreated into my room. The next morning I almost tripped over it. It had spent the night outside my door... stalking me.
  - stephen_cagle 2y ago
    It was probably waiting for a tip you cretin! :]
  - waste_monk 2y ago
    Perhaps it was simply a very big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and thought that no-one should be without a towel.
    - jamiek88 2y ago
      There was something very Douglas Adams about that story. Robot: can I get you some towels? Man, confused just enters room and shuts door. Eight hours later he emerges for breakfast. Robot: well?
      - robinsonb5 2y ago
        It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
- animal531 2y ago
  Here in the 3rd world we still often use people instead of robots mainly due to cost, but it's definitely changing. Why struggle with government rules, unions and individuals if a machine can do it? Jobs are already really hard to come by on all the unskilled levels, it's a bit grim to be honest.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
TIL a new (to me) word. No wonder I did poorly on the GRE language section. trun·dled, trun·dling. to cause (a circular object) to roll along; roll. to convey or move in a wagon, cart, or other wheeled vehicle; wheel: The farmer trundled his produce to market in a rickety wagon. Archaic. to cause to rotate; twirl; spin.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >roll >wheel >rotate Trundle sounds vaguely treadmill, which also has something to do with rotation :) Wonder if the two words are etymologically related.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    The word made sense, I was just surprised there was a special word for rolling robot movement, hopefully it gets more use in the future as robots become more common.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      Yes, I did know that the word trundle made sense, because I have come across it before in books, as a kid, in stories for children. E.g. "The gardener trundled his wheelbarrow along the (garden) path." (The word is not use much nowadays; archaic, as the dictionary entry says.) I was only speculating about the connection between the two words (trundle and treadmill), because they sound vaguely similar. Maybe they have a common Latin or Old English or Old German root, as many English words do. Update: I checked, and it seems I may have been partly / loosely correct about the etymological connection: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trundle https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trundle Etymology Noun and Verb from trundle small wheel, alteration of earlier trendle, from Middle English, circle, ring, wheel, from Old English trendel; akin to Old English trendan to revolve https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/treadmill https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/treadmill c : a mill worked by persons treading on steps on the periphery of a wide wheel having a horizontal axis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tread https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tread tread 2 of 2 noun 1 a(1) : the part of a wheel or tire that makes contact with a road or rail Italics mine.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
I don't understand why they don't enforce dumpsters like any other big city. Then again if there is perpetual incompetence in nyc, it probably means corrupted parties and individuals benefit from the situation somehow.
- mattficke 2y ago
  They’re starting to roll out trash containers in the city, should have been done years ago. There’s a bunch of interconnected factors: all residential buildings in NYC get municipal trash pickup (most other cities require private trash service for large apartment buildings), Manhattan doesn’t have many alleys so trash has to go out front, on-street parking blocks larger curbside bins and using exclusively wheeled cans would crowd the sidewalks. They finally decided to remove some parking spaces to allow for large curbside bins.
  - oblio 2y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/p1ohdi/this_way_that_the_dutch_collect_their_trash_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/p1ohd...
    - ajb 2y ago
      Ok that's clever. I suspect if would be difficult in many places to find enough pavement slots without re-routing a lot of cables and pipes. And yet, the Dutch must have introduced this solution relatively recently - I guess they already run all their cables and pipes below the road, not the pavement? I know that while in my street the gas, water, and drains run under the road, the electricity supply is under the pavement.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    You know what crowds the sidewalks worse than wheel bins? Having that same volume of trash bagged and leaking all over the place sustaining local rat populations. Honestly everything you mentioned as a potential con sounds like an improvement to the existing state of affairs.
pyuser583 2y ago
They “trundle?” That’s a cool word.
- racl101 2y ago
  I too like learning new words. Seems like a synonym for 'lumbering' minus the awkward part.
falcor84 2y ago
>Just watching robots trundle around as though it's normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. My nostalgic reference for this is R.A.L.F. from Flight of the Navigator - https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F.
- bsder 2y ago
  Your link is missing the trailing period so it goes to a non-existent page. The correct link is: <https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F. https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F.>
Xophmeister 2y ago
I used to live in an area with a similar system for rubbish (near Wembley Stadium, in north west London). While it worked, it suffered from a number of “quality of life” issues. The chute terminals had quite a small aperture, with a sealed door; presumably to make it easier to create the necessary pressure differential. This happened regularly; every 30 minutes (or so) during daylight hours. It was loud. Really loud! With several terminals in a courtyard, running in a sequence, it was almost a never ending reverberation. Of course, you can’t use them while they’re in this cycle. If anyone overfilled them — which was very easy — or ended up jamming the door open with some misshapen detritus then, try as it might, it just wouldn’t work at all. The building management were regularly seen wielding a broom, to try to force stuck loads down. Then, if you had anything that just couldn’t be made small enough for the chute, you had to use the (limited) dumpsters anyway; many did, because it was often just easier. That’s not to say I think it wasn’t a good idea. It just needed its rough edges smoothed out a bit.
lucioperca 2y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33R6eoPoczs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33R6eoPoczs

by hnbear 2y ago

fusslo 2y ago

my office adjoins a factory where we produce what we engineer in the offices. The factory has two or maybe three different types of robots delivering all sorts of things from packages to packaging to stainless steel bar. the robots use the same walkways as the humans. It seems more and more we are designing robots to occupy and utilize the same spaces as humans. And we're designing the robots to make the humans give way: they're slow, large, bulky, and just stop when confronted. I think it's because humans are a much better robot. humans (generally, of course) are more agile, can route easily, and move our bodies in unexpected ways to accomplish the task (lift a box up from waist height over an obstacle for example) though I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot in my local stop & shop

hnbear 2y ago
> the robots use the same walkways as the humans. How much of this is that the robots are far newer than the buildings? How soon till new buildings are designed with designated robotic paths? Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  It will be much cheaper, and not that hard to make the robots super safe and considerate.
  - ssrc 2y ago
    And then we send them to Jupiter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional
- wongarsu 2y ago
  We do that all the time, we just don't usually consider them to be robots. Car factories have all kinds of vehicles transporting car parts along tracks, ceiling mounted rails, etc. Nobody bats an eye about that. If you squint hard enough elevators are a kind of robot on a designated pathway. But to be called a robot it has to have some human-like (or at least animal-like) quality. Which usually involves either imitating human arms (e.g. typical industrial robot arms), imitating human movement (e.g. Boston dynamics) or using infrastructure designed for humans. If you put a delivery robot on a purpose-built path it has none of those qualities and reverts back to being a normal machine.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations. For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes. What's the problem supposed to be with running cables through clips on the wall? That you'll know they're there? That you can easily access them?
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes. Install flexible plastic tubes instead and you can just pull out cables when you need to replace them for whatever reason.
sandworm101 2y ago
>> I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot I ran into one of these things late one night after checking into a hotel. Dead tired, I got off the elevator and was walking down the hall when this 3-foot high dalek started following me. "Can I get you some towels?" I retreated into my room. The next morning I almost tripped over it. It had spent the night outside my door... stalking me.
- stephen_cagle 2y ago
  It was probably waiting for a tip you cretin! :]
- waste_monk 2y ago
  Perhaps it was simply a very big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and thought that no-one should be without a towel.
  - jamiek88 2y ago
    There was something very Douglas Adams about that story. Robot: can I get you some towels? Man, confused just enters room and shuts door. Eight hours later he emerges for breakfast. Robot: well?
    - robinsonb5 2y ago
      It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
animal531 2y ago
Here in the 3rd world we still often use people instead of robots mainly due to cost, but it's definitely changing. Why struggle with government rules, unions and individuals if a machine can do it? Jobs are already really hard to come by on all the unskilled levels, it's a bit grim to be honest.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

TIL a new (to me) word. No wonder I did poorly on the GRE language section. trun·dled, trun·dling. to cause (a circular object) to roll along; roll. to convey or move in a wagon, cart, or other wheeled vehicle; wheel: The farmer trundled his produce to market in a rickety wagon. Archaic. to cause to rotate; twirl; spin.

fuzztester 2y ago
>roll >wheel >rotate Trundle sounds vaguely treadmill, which also has something to do with rotation :) Wonder if the two words are etymologically related.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  The word made sense, I was just surprised there was a special word for rolling robot movement, hopefully it gets more use in the future as robots become more common.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    Yes, I did know that the word trundle made sense, because I have come across it before in books, as a kid, in stories for children. E.g. "The gardener trundled his wheelbarrow along the (garden) path." (The word is not use much nowadays; archaic, as the dictionary entry says.) I was only speculating about the connection between the two words (trundle and treadmill), because they sound vaguely similar. Maybe they have a common Latin or Old English or Old German root, as many English words do. Update: I checked, and it seems I may have been partly / loosely correct about the etymological connection: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trundle https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trundle Etymology Noun and Verb from trundle small wheel, alteration of earlier trendle, from Middle English, circle, ring, wheel, from Old English trendel; akin to Old English trendan to revolve https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/treadmill https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/treadmill c : a mill worked by persons treading on steps on the periphery of a wide wheel having a horizontal axis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tread https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tread tread 2 of 2 noun 1 a(1) : the part of a wheel or tire that makes contact with a road or rail Italics mine.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

I don't understand why they don't enforce dumpsters like any other big city. Then again if there is perpetual incompetence in nyc, it probably means corrupted parties and individuals benefit from the situation somehow.

mattficke 2y ago
They’re starting to roll out trash containers in the city, should have been done years ago. There’s a bunch of interconnected factors: all residential buildings in NYC get municipal trash pickup (most other cities require private trash service for large apartment buildings), Manhattan doesn’t have many alleys so trash has to go out front, on-street parking blocks larger curbside bins and using exclusively wheeled cans would crowd the sidewalks. They finally decided to remove some parking spaces to allow for large curbside bins.
- oblio 2y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/p1ohdi/this_way_that_the_dutch_collect_their_trash_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/p1ohd...
  - ajb 2y ago
    Ok that's clever. I suspect if would be difficult in many places to find enough pavement slots without re-routing a lot of cables and pipes. And yet, the Dutch must have introduced this solution relatively recently - I guess they already run all their cables and pipes below the road, not the pavement? I know that while in my street the gas, water, and drains run under the road, the electricity supply is under the pavement.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  You know what crowds the sidewalks worse than wheel bins? Having that same volume of trash bagged and leaking all over the place sustaining local rat populations. Honestly everything you mentioned as a potential con sounds like an improvement to the existing state of affairs.

pyuser583 2y ago

They “trundle?” That’s a cool word.

racl101 2y ago
I too like learning new words. Seems like a synonym for 'lumbering' minus the awkward part.

falcor84 2y ago

>Just watching robots trundle around as though it's normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. My nostalgic reference for this is R.A.L.F. from Flight of the Navigator - https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F.

bsder 2y ago
Your link is missing the trailing period so it goes to a non-existent page. The correct link is: <https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F. https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/R.A.L.F.>

Xophmeister 2y ago

I used to live in an area with a similar system for rubbish (near Wembley Stadium, in north west London). While it worked, it suffered from a number of “quality of life” issues. The chute terminals had quite a small aperture, with a sealed door; presumably to make it easier to create the necessary pressure differential. This happened regularly; every 30 minutes (or so) during daylight hours. It was loud. Really loud! With several terminals in a courtyard, running in a sequence, it was almost a never ending reverberation. Of course, you can’t use them while they’re in this cycle. If anyone overfilled them — which was very easy — or ended up jamming the door open with some misshapen detritus then, try as it might, it just wouldn’t work at all. The building management were regularly seen wielding a broom, to try to force stuck loads down. Then, if you had anything that just couldn’t be made small enough for the chute, you had to use the (limited) dumpsters anyway; many did, because it was often just easier. That’s not to say I think it wasn’t a good idea. It just needed its rough edges smoothed out a bit.

lucioperca 2y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33R6eoPoczs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33R6eoPoczs