[HN Gopher] Sorting waste and recyclables with a fleet of robots ___________________________________________________________________ Sorting waste and recyclables with a fleet of robots Author : mfiguiere Score : 69 points Date : 2023-04-13 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (ai.googleblog.com) (TXT) w3m dump (ai.googleblog.com) | nkamoah17 wrote: | reminds me of my senior design project | | https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6794799... | epaulson wrote: | Others have pointed out that doing this in an office setting is | probably low-value, since the volumes are low and you can do a | lot of this at the recycling facility already once it gets | trucked away (though cleaner inputs are always welcome!) | | Where I think we really need something like this is for outdoor | uses and picking up litter. Mobility is more of a challenge but | getting something to wander up and down the edges of highways | picking up trash would be great. | orangepurple wrote: | If there is even a slight financial incentive to recycle stuff | people will go hunting for recyclables - no need for robots. | singularity2001 wrote: | In germany people are hunting for empty bottles (and | recently: cans) since you get between 25 and 50 cents for | returning them to shops. | howmayiannoyyou wrote: | This is already being done at an industrial scale in MRFs using | robotic systems from various industry vendors, including AMP | Robotics (www.amprobotics.com, Alan Ross Machinery | (www.alanross.biz) and ZenRobotics (www.zenrobotics.com). This | makes pretty good sense at an industrial scale, but probably not | much economic sense at an office scale given the low incremental | value of the recyclables. That said, recycling & waste processing | is among the most dangerous jobs and there are good safety | arguments for using this tech in lower volume applications, | though probably still not office waste. | jeddawson wrote: | Came here to say the same. Love seeing waste industry stuff at | HN :) | | Prairie Robotics (and similar) is another interesting take on | the problem at the industrial scale. They are recognizing | contamination as the waste is collected so the generators | (houses/businesses) can be notified and educated. | hbn wrote: | Never heard of Prairie Robotics but I was curious if they had | anything to do with where I live since I'm in a prairie | province. Turns out their corporate HQ is in my city! | barathr wrote: | There are some startups doing similar things in production | facilities: https://recycleye.com/ | tired_and_awake wrote: | Isn't this a little bizarre? Didn't Google just layoff the entire | EDR team? And then brain publishes an article on their work and | credits the team that was shut down? | | Am I missing something or is this incredibly tone deaf? | skybrian wrote: | * * * | alsodumb wrote: | From what I understand EDR team was absorbed internally, with | most of them going to Brain. So technically they just shutdown | EDR without really laying off the small team. I could be wrong | though. | | Edit: Looks like I was wrong. My interactions were only with a | few folks on the research side which may not be representative | of the entire EDR team. | TaylorAlexander wrote: | When I was there the team was roughly 50% contractors (as | many as they could have). I wonder how they fared. Right when | it happened I spoke to a couple of friends. One mentioned | they might be laid off or might move to another team. I | suspect there is some mix of layoffs and team changes. | alphabot314 wrote: | > I could be wrong though. | | Yep, you are. | | A small percentage of the EDR team (and mainly contractors) | were absorbed by Google Research - the vast majority of the | team was let go. | dekhn wrote: | Isn't it a little bizarre just how much time, money, and | brainpower Google puts into projects that have no hope of | replacing established businesses (who are often doing | production versions of the Google research already)? \ | dgacmu wrote: | It's probably better to have the paper come out with your name | on it so you can point to it in your cv and be able to talk | about it publicly. Not that it takes away much of the pain of | being laid off, mind you. | Animats wrote: | That's been commercially available for over five years now.[1] | Robots doing that are already widely deployed. If you take the | tour of the SF recycling center, you can see some of them.[2] | | This works at scale. Here's a 90 ton per hour recycling | facility.[3] | | This is the difference between feel-good recycling and industrial | scale recycling. | | [1] https://www.max-ai.com/ | | [2] https://www.max-ai.com/video-max-ai-autonomous-qc/ | | [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FpsH_ETT7c | dan-robertson wrote: | I think there's some university-publicity-office dynamics here | where the OP ends up making silly claims about real world | applications. I think the article is much more 'here is | research we did in controlling a robotic arm with neural | networks, in real-time, in the real world' than 'we think this | is the best way to sort waste'. | | I think this is like you read some university press release | about some research into a weird graph theory algorithm and | explained that social networks have been available for decades | and their approach isn't relevant there. | | The waste sorting systems are interesting. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-13 23:00 UTC)