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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.
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
If the union leadership is smart they'll see that the automation is coming regardless, and will work toward a solution that slowly replaces workers as they retire with mechanization instead of one day the parent organization lays-off the entire union when the brand new fleet of autonomous machines appears. The Union can also migrate toward organization of the maintenance staff that take care of the machines, which will require their own specific kinds of maintenance, and are also probably somewhat better paying jobs that simply operating the trucks are.
Some unions over time have had the foresight to do this while others have not. It's bad for a society to have a lot of unemployed, probably worse than having inefficiency in the system due to outmoded practices.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
from tfa the mockup shows a typical suburb, but in a city collecting trash is much more complex. offices and apartment complexes often store their dumpsters in the buildings parking garage or in a tight alleyway. garbage trucks cant get to them directly, and so rely on smaller positioning vehicles to take the dumpster to a location the truck can safely reach. on large streets, dumpsters can take up an entire lane of traffic or parking while waiting for a garbage pickup. at the end of the day, positioning vehicles return the dumpster to its original location.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I live in an urban area, and unfortunately there has been an influx of hipsters over the last three or four years. If you aren't aware, hipsters tend to not have kids. Instead they own dogs. Not just one or two dogs, but sometimes three or four dogs. Since they live in loft apartments without yards, they just let their dogs shit outside. Being the products of suburbia, these hipsters tend not to know how to do something as basic as pick up dog shit with a scoop, or even a bag over their hand.
So our public areas are now covered in dog shit. It's all over the place. It's on the sidewalks. It's on park benches. It's hidden in the grass. It's tracked all over the place by innocent victims who accidentally have stepped in it.
Getting these hipsters to clean up their dogs' shit isn't going to happen. I'm not even certain that they can bend down that far, given how tight their jeans are, especially on the men with the fanciest artisanal moustaches. They won't give up their dogs, either, because these are their "fur babies".
We need robots that could come along and automatically clean up the dog shit that's all over the place. Then it can dispose of it by sneaking up behind these hipsters, and smearing the shit all over the backs and clothes of these hipsters.
Those are the kinds of robots we need!
Where I live (a rather affluent suburb of Vienna, Austria) trash collection is done by unskilled, lowly-educated workers who don't have much chance at any other type of job. I would hate to think of these poor people being pushed out of about the only job they could get by... robots.
There definitely is an ethical side to employing - or not employing - robots. I truly do hope we get that one right, for once.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The relevant GIF
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.