[HN Gopher] Sorting waste and recyclables with a fleet of robots
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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.
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