401–410 of 588 posts
If this makes it easier and faster to sort garbage, we could probably improve the efficiency of recycling 100x. I know there are some places that do that already, but there are so many menial tasks that could be done by robots to improve the world.
Just had cameras, visual detection, some compressed air nozzles, and millisecond (nanosecond?) reaction time to separate the non-recyclable materials.
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Well, it's actually good to have that kind of marketing. First, because there are people that don't care anyway and keep mixing things. So, robots can be useful just the same. And for the ones that actually follow the marketing, it's a good incentive to try to reduce the usage of one use plastics and packages in general. Recycling is the last of the 3 Rs for a reason.
Honestly I am so frustrated with the approach of "lets take a population of millions of people and ask them all to sort perfectly". 'Tis a silly thing. Some people won't care, some people will care but mistakes will happen, some people will care about money more and so will deliberately dump things in the wrong bucket. Get everyone to dump their crap into one pile and actually invest in industrial processes to sort t…
We are asked to do hundreds of little things that mildly inconvenience us in order to maintain some social contract. Sure they could be made easier/nonexistent with better technology, but I:
1) don't see why asking people to do their part is silly
2) don't see why this particular problem would be more frustrating than e.g. the others I've mentioned. I feel like they are all similar on the "effort" scale.
Although I guess I'd admit that asking people to sort recycling properly is very different than relying on them to.
If this makes it easier and faster to sort garbage, we could probably improve the efficiency of recycling 100x. I know there are some places that do that already, but there are so many menial tasks that could be done by robots to improve the world.
Have seen demos where garbage sorting has been automated. No AI necessary. Just had cameras, visual detection, some compressed air nozzles, and millisecond (nanosecond?) reaction time to separate the non-recyclable materials.
does anyone know if any of the robot arms being used in these videos, especially the ones that look like just an aluminium extrusion, are off-the-shelf things that can be purchased somewhere? even if its a kit? I would love to experiment with something like this but everytime I try to figure out what hardware to do it with there's a thousand cheap no-name options and then bam 30k+ for the pro ones.
However, when I looked at the BOM I was surprised that the actual arm they use is an incredibly expensive off-the-self arm https://www.trossenrobotics.com/viperx-300
For a much cheaper option take a look at https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot (this is an AI training library/framework) which uses the SO-100 arm https://github.com/TheRobotStudio/SO-ARM100 (one arm is $123). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n32OmyoQkfs
There's also the Parol6 arm, which is more performant than the SO-100, but more expensive: https://source-robotics.com
If this makes it easier and faster to sort garbage, we could probably improve the efficiency of recycling 100x. I know there are some places that do that already, but there are so many menial tasks that could be done by robots to improve the world.
There are plenty of places [1] where garbage is sorted for free by poor people who scrape a living from recycling it. Sorting garbage is a terrible job for humans, but it's a terrible one for robots too. Those fancy mechanical actuators etc are not going to stand up well to garbage that's regularly saturated with liquids, oil, grease, vomit, feces, dead animals, etc. [1] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=…
If this makes it easier and faster to sort garbage, we could probably improve the efficiency of recycling 100x. I know there are some places that do that already, but there are so many menial tasks that could be done by robots to improve the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I am so frustrated with the approach of "lets take a population of millions of people and ask them all to sort perfectly". 'Tis a silly thing. Some people won't care, some people will care but mistakes will happen, some people will care about money more and so will deliberately dump things in the wrong bucket. Get everyone to dump their crap into one pile and actually invest in industrial processes to sort t…
Picking up after your dog. Putting the grocery cart away after unloading. Shoveling the sidewalk in front of your house. Waiting to the side of the subway doors. Not talking during movies. We are asked to do hundreds of little things that mildly inconvenience us in order to maintain some social contract. Sure they could be made easier/nonexistent with better technology, but I: 1) don't see why asking people to do the…
But I don't think this is a good system of caring for our environment. If we cared properly, rather than half-arsing it we'd have a proper industrial system with known outputs that we could improve upon. Instead we seem to have a "feel good you did your part, now forget about it" process. I guess it is shambling it's way to something more but it doesn't seem like it's in a rush - kinda the same way the world agrees on acting on climate change but no one is in a rush.
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Get concerned when you see a real product in the market that has a sustainable business model. The man behind the curtain here has an army of engineers, unlimited cloud nodes and basically has harvested all the data currently available in the world. It doesn't get any better than this right now. What's next? They'll ping you later on Linked-in with this awesome idea that you need to make sure runs in a $1 USD microco…
It doesn't get any better than this right now. And it won't ever get any worse.
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If you can recognize what garbage to yeet, you can already yeet it today. You don't need a terribly slow robot arm to do it.
Yeah, maybe someone with more industry knowledge can give a better picture, but I have a hard time seeing how these robots would fit into and improve existing processes [0]. Garbage is mechanically sorted most of the way already; then IR is used to identify different plastics and air blasts are used to separate them out at dozens per second. The Gemini robot tech is cool as heck, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't se…
1. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/
Fuck it, make the arms big enough and it can do laundry, load/unload dishwasher, clean up after cooking/eating.
I can finally see this happening. Probably Tesla first tho.