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.

Comments

Pick up dog shit in urban areas.

[Anonymous Coward]

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!