Robots' Next Big Job: Trash Pickup 112
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.
Maybe for urban areas... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Pick up dog shit in urban areas. (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:Pick up dog shit in urban areas. (Score:4, Insightful)
timed honored solution to that problem. shoot their damn dogs
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All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
When we're poisoning pigeons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcanines in the park
Every Sunday you'll see my sweetheart and me
As we poison the pigeons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcanines in the park...
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+1 classic Tom Lehrer
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shoot the goddamned hipster owner instead.
Slavery is detestable, to be sure, but the problem isn't hipster owners. The problem is hipster owners who let their hipsters outside and don't clean up after their mess. If they keep their hipsters indoors and train them well, they'll eventually mature into productive adults at some point in their 30s or 40s.
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murder is wrong, even of hipster trash, but mashing a hipsters face in their own dog's feces may not be so wrong. what are they going to do, try to beat you up with bean sprout, cauliflower, and ramps fed muscles?
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You can't possibly be a real person! It's like a caricature of someone so destroyed by that which they hate, that they become an even greater evil. Your hatred of hipsters has caused you to become a vile, filth-spewing menace to polite society.
Penny Arcade had something to say [penny-arcade.com] on this kind of thing. Sad thing is that they're right.
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B.S. I grew up in an urban area and lived there for decades. I can tell you unequivocally that the dogshit was there before the hipsters arrived.
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Being hipsters, I'm surprised they didn't pick up their dog's poop before it was cool.
+1 Artful Double-Entendre (Score:1)
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Looks like Joe_Dragon's forgot his password.
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AI pretty much agree. The process is already pretty automated as it is. Truck comes by every Thursday and robotic arms already grab and empty the bin.
The pace at which the driver can move from house to house is pretty impressive. Our entire street doesn't take more than a few minutes. I honestly don't see It getting much more efficient.
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The process is already pretty automated as it is.
I get the feeling that the author of TFA doesn't really know the state-of-the-art in trash disposal. Unless you can replace the driver, the process is not going to get much more efficient, and I don't think a 5 ton garbage truck in a residential neighborhood is a good place to introduce self-driving vehicles.
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The process is already pretty automated as it is. Truck comes by every Thursday and robotic arms already grab and empty the bin.
Our semi-rural area is kind of weird. While our recycle bins are provided by the disposal company and are emptied by a semi-automated truck in the manner you describe, our garbage pickup (run by that same company) involves a guy on the truck picking up our (self-provided) trash cans and dumping them into the truck manually.
Actually half the time it appears the poor guy driving the truck is doing it all - driving the truck, getting out, running to the curb, dumping the can, then getting back into the truck t
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Yep. The exception I see is that sometimes the dude has to hop out when there is a car too close and he needs to drag it out in the street. Autonomous trash trucks won't handle that.
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Yep. The exception I see is that sometimes the dude has to hop out when there is a car too close and he needs to drag it out in the street. Autonomous trash trucks won't handle that.
Sure they will. They just won't pick those cans up. Then it will be up to the owners of the cans to work out a solution with their neighbors to ensure that there's enough space to position the can for pickup.
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The City of Atlanta supplies standardized cans but still has guys on the truck manually emptying them. Maybe that's why trash pickup costs almost $50/month (for a single-family residence) here.
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Likewise... While two people could lift one of our cans while full, it would be a heck of a task, they are 52 or 56 gallon cans that are heavy as heck when full of trash...
The robot truck picks them up like they are toys however.
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Our cans -- for both trash and recycling -- are "herby curbys," so they're (just barely) small enough to be wheeled or dragged around by a person, but probably not lifted. There are always three guys on a garbage truck: one to drive, and two to grab cans from the curb and put them on the lift to be dumped in the truck. The crew works both sides of the street at the same time, which is why there are two guys in the back, not one.
Maybe "manually" was a poor choice of words since a machine actually dumps the c
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I pay $26 a month for once weekly trash pickup, and it is done via machine truck with only a driver using those standard large cans.
That $26 also covers yard debris removal and once a month bulk collection removal. It also includes every other week recycling removal.
I honestly can't complain... For $300 a year, an incredible amount of waste, both trash and recycle materials, is removed from my home with the only effort on my part to put it in the back drive way either in one of the large bins, or on the g
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No kidding! And it's even worse than the situation you're talking about for your town: in Atlanta, trash pickup is run directly by the Public Works department. And it's billed as part of the property tax, so if you don't pay it they can foreclose on your house.
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The City of Atlanta supplies standardized cans but still has guys on the truck manually emptying them. Maybe that's why trash pickup costs almost $50/month (for a single-family residence) here.
Why don't you decline the service then and handle it yourself by driving to the dump every week? Or move to a place that doesn't mind if people let flies and maggots accumulate on their trash in their own yard, aka not require trash service?
Or get the city to improve their trash collection process to use fewer people and cost less money. The service in my town costs $15 per month for weekly pickup. No flies and maggots, no trash accumulation, and less than one-third the price. $50 per month is outrageous.
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Or get the city to improve their trash collection process to use fewer people and cost less money. The service in my town costs $15 per month for weekly pickup. No flies and maggots, no trash accumulation, and less than one-third the price. $50 per month is outrageous.
Providing unconnected figures is meaningless in a vacuum. How much do you think a dozen eggs and a quart of milk should cost? Should it cost the same in Atlanta as it does in Alaska, Hawaii, or a big dairy state like NY?
Sure, costs vary. But 3X, for the same service in roughly the same context (single-family house), indicates a problem.
I'll bet the price of a house where you live is half the price of downtown Atlanta too
No, housing prices are pretty comparable.
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We have standardized bins for compost items (food waste, cat litter, etc) and when they are aren't very full the person empties it into the truck themselves. When it's heavy they use the lifter at the back of the truck. While the lifter is quick it's quicker still for them to dump it themselves.
They are probably paid so much for doing the route or at least a certain minimum number of hours and when they are done their route they can go. I know that the people that deliver mail to the community mailboxes
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The outlier that still amazes me was featured on Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" show, where a trash collector in New Orleans uses a canvas sack. He negotiates a tiny staircase to climb or descend to a shop, dumps their trash into his tarp, then hauls the tarp back down to the truck where he empties it. It looks unchanged from the founding days of New Orleans.
Could this be automated? There isn't currently space in the alleys or in the buildings for the trash cans themselves. It would require the city to change
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That's part why I don't know how good robotics would be for this unless they're willing to also modify how the trash gets accumulated in the buildings to start with, and the more consolidation done in each building, the easier it is
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Though our county service still uses the 2 men on the back of the truck method, it is now providing a standard trash can. If a marker were placed on the can next to the handle in the back, it shouldn't be TOO hard to get a grappler to find it's way to the handle (much like the automated charger we saw on /. a month or two ago finds the charge port). That would at least simplify the problem to be a matter of making sure the handle faces the street.
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It's very efficient. There's enough play in the claw that
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Ignorance is bliss (Score:1)
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Yeah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4)
You pinpointed the reason this will never work. It's too much trouble for the home owner. We can't even get people to recycle and compost in my area, because the people who own the houses would rather just throw everything in a single bin. Having automated pickup is going to cause so many more problems. If the trash doesn't get picked up because the robot didn't like the orientation of the bin, do you have to wait another week for the garbage to get picked up? What happens when you have a little bit more garbage than usual and you can't fit it all in the standard bin?
We actually have the mechanical arms and standardized bins for compost, and they never use them. The guys doing the pickup have figured out it's much easier just to do it by hand. They can get the route done in less time and have more time to enjoy themselves.
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Places with recycling programs have a worse problem.
Our previous municipality did curbside recycle sorting. We'd put stuff out already separated (although I suspect this wasn't a common practice; we just had extra bins), but they still had to dig through and pull out non-recyclables and handle mixups, plus plastic bags were handled separately, not to mention broken down cardboard boxes.
Our current mu
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If you don't orient the can reasonably properly, it gets left there. You will have to store it till the next pickup. Eventually, the smelly garbage encourages you to try orienting the can properly.
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You don't live in my area. Based on the smelly crap that gets left, even with human workers, the people clearly don't have a sense of smell.
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Actually, I always though that would be a great use for robots, trash separation.
As you say, you just don't get the people to recycle properly. We're likely to never get them to do it, so why not instead try developing robots with advanced vision and other sensors to recognize different types of trash, and nimble "hands" to sort them as they enter waste processing plants?
It is certainly a hard problem both from SW and HW point of view, but worth solving.
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You know these bins and automated arms already exist right? and they aren't causing near as many problems as you seem to think they are.
Perhaps you should leave the basement and see what the world is like before assuming everyone on the internet is stupider than you...
p.s. I live in an area with snow, frequently snow banks of hard packed snow 3-4 feet tall on the side of the road... trash cans simply get put on the driveway which has to be cleared any how to get in and out of the driveway.
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You aren't wrong, but you are a total douchebag,
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There are no 'precise specfications' for alignment. There is printing on the bin that says 'This side toward street'. My trash has been picked up this way for more than a decade, never seen any problems with it, even in snow.
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Not where I am, if you don't put the can out properly they don't pick it up and you are stuck until next week. People figure it out real quick!
Stupid Humans and Trash Management (Score:2)
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I'd prefer it if they'd figure who the shitbird is who keeps dumping trash in the glass recycling bin and deal with him directly.
I mean for fuck's sake, the glass bin is *right next to* the the goddamned trash bin.
I can almost understand the laziness that keep people from sorting thier trash and recyclables, but for the love of Cthulhu, if you're not going to, at least put your goddamned trash in the trash bin so that the rest of us don't have to suffer your stupidity. Seriously, I'm about the laziest pers
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It could work on my street (Score:1)
They've already taken... (Score:2)
digging ditches for a living. See Bertha Seattle.
UrbanMech (Score:1)
They'll have to call it the UrbanMech...
Just tell the robots (Score:2)
"... or you don't get no spending cash"
Presumably robots can't talk back anyway.
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Yackety yack!
Oh No! (Score:2)
Now there's no hope of Slashdotters ever getting a date.
Robot sidles up to some suitably trashy female in a bar: "Say, baby (beep). Do (click, click) you come here often (modem noises)?"
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Not "might not". Will not, can not, was never going to except in the mind of the idiot who thought it would. And it won't work in suburbs either.
Any marvelous technology which assumes the world will be redesigned around that marvelous technology is not marvelous technology. It's crap, and will never happen.
It's a designer or a futurist telling us how they've come up with a really elegant solution, and then complaining the world is too disorganized for your elegant solution to work.
Now, if we could just c
Will it be followed by a robot cleanup crew? (Score:2)
Unfair (Score:3)
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.
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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.
Don't worry. If /. has taught us anything, it's that there will be plenty of jobs services those robots to replace the ones they take away.
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This change and pace of technological change is inevitable, and is what should really be discussed now while we still have a chance.
There seems to be this smug self importance to many that post on this site thinking they can't be touched by the oncoming wave.
They are planning on having computer systems do air traffic control. No that won't remove all the human jobs in that area, but most of them. Pilots?
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In addition to the parent's point, humans picking up the garbage provides a much better service than the robot trucks. I don't have to worry about fitting everything into the uniform sized plastic bin. I can pile whatever oddly shaped boxes, cans or large items by the road, and the humans can deal with them quickly and efficiently. I don't really care if it makes trash hauling slightly more expensive, it makes my job of taking out the trash much easier. I live in an area where humans pick up the trash,
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Trash collection is a smell, undesirable job. If you're doing a make-work program, why not make it something pleasant?
GIF is relevant (Score:3, Funny)
The relevant GIF [imgur.com]
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Thanks that was funny.
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As funny as that was, the problem there was the homeowner placed the bin facing the wrong way. That's trivially easy for a human to identify and correct, but for an automated system somebody has to think through how to deal with all the permutations of that problem and include a solution in the operation logic.
Re: GIF is relevant (Score:2)
Circular cans! Who'd da thunk it? A detent to orient the lid.
Surprised (Score:2)
Re: Surprised (Score:2)
Kids, mother-in-law, too many cats next door...
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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.
garbage (Score:2)
Piloted robots? You mean machines? By that logic the self-driving car has been here for a century, since you don't have to put your feet through the floor and push.