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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.
Oh, horseshit.
If your fucking marvelous system of automation is dependent on humans aligning something to precise specifications so a machine can do it ... your marvelous system of automation is too useless to use in the real world.
Until I see the placement for these damned bins being embedded in the sidewalk or curb, having some idiot talking about how asshat humans can fuck up the whole system is missing the point. It needs to be pointed out that the world isn't built around, or predicated upon humans aligning things exactly according to your moronic plan.
Oh, fuck that. Don't blame me because some clueless idiot thinks he's going to have a system which works perfectly as long as the humans comply.
And in any place which actually gets snow and the like, the physical impossibility of this is pretty apparent on the first week.
I'll schlep my garbage to the curb, but don't assume I'll align it to a grid, because that's just a completely moronic assumption.
If these automated systems don't work in the real world, it's not because of defective humans. It's because of moron engineers who think the world needs to change to match their revolutionary new system. Period.
Until this shit is part of municipal infrastructure and planning (which is never will be), a bunch of people complaining about how the humans messed up this oh-so-elegant-system is pathetic. If you're system can't deal with the fact that a whiny teenager had to be cajoled into taking out the garbage ... your system is useless, and makes stupid assumptions about the world.
You're simply never going to get people to comply with that, and expecting they will screams "too stupid to be solving this problem".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.