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Robots' Next Big Job: Trash Pickup
Nerval's Lobster writes: You've heard of self-driving cars, fast-moving robots, and automated homes. Now a research group led by Volvo, a waste-recycling company, and a trio of universities in the United States and Sweden want to bring much of the same technology to bear on a new problem: trash disposal. Specifically, the consortium wants to build a robot that will collect trash-bins from in front of peoples' homes, carry those bins to the nearest waste-disposal truck, and empty them. While that's a pretty simple (although smelly) task for a human being, it's an incredibly complex task for a robot, which will need to evaluate and respond to a wide range of environmental variables while carrying a heavy load. An uneven curb, or an overloaded bin, could spell disaster. Hopefully Volvo's experiment can succeed in a way that some of its other self-driving projects have failed. It's struck me, too, how the trash collection vehicles that come by my house are mostly piloted robots already; the humans are there to deal with problems and control the joysticks, but hydraulic arms lift and empty the garbage containers themselves.
...but in suburban and rural areas this really wouldn't be that necessary. As long as there's room for a standardized bin to be wheeled to the street by the tenant or resident of the property then the trash truck is capable of automatically picking up the can and dumping its contents so long as the driver stops the truck at the right spot.
There are still some places where two or three men work each truck, where one drives and one or two manually dump the tenants' or residents' own cans instead of a standardized can supplied by the municipality, but I suspect those are more due to negotiated rules between the unions and the waste management services; the unions want to keep their people employed and the service doesn't want to spend $300,000 per truck to replace their old manual truck that still run with new automated trucks, so they keep the existing system in place.
Makes me wonder how easy it would be to automate trash collection from high density areas though, where each building and possibly each floor would have its own unique method for placing trash for collection. It might require standardization, to a degree, on the part of the residents.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
timed honored solution to that problem. shoot their damn dogs