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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.
From TFS:
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.
Where I am, the human drives the truck, gets it lined up with the can, etc. If some asshat homeowner puts the bin out too far from the curb, or turned "wrong" (sideways or backwards or not mostly square to the road), said worker has to hop out and get the bin in position for the arms to grab, slaps teh big red button on the side of the truck, and the hydraulics/mechanics/robotics take over from there.
The human is still needed for the fuzzy logic stuff - driving, checking distance of the bin to the road, orientation of the bin, etc - but with a halfway considerate homeowner they don't need to get out of the truck that often. Big change from the "hop out, toss 2 full cans up and dump 'em in, compact it, head to next set of cans" model that was around a few years back...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
My city uses prisoners to dump the cans, while a guard of some kind drives the truck. There could be some downsides to this, but it gives the inmates something to do rather than hang around the jail.
I've lived here for 20 years and have yet to hear about any trying to escape, so there must be a nice incentive to do the job.