Sorting waste and recyclables with a fleet of robots
ai.googleblog.com
ai.googleblog.com
These robots are a research platform for solving many tasks. There's no point in comparing them to industrial, stationary robots in a recycling facility. It's like comparing a smartphone camera to a fax machine.
Google should have cut this earlier and kept Boston Dynamics instead. I mean it's cool work but my opinion is that general AI advancements are going to dramatically change how all this is done in pretty short order. Meanwhile the hardware side of things is in need of way more investment, and that investment won't be obsoleted as the software improves, in fact quite the opposite. The investment will pay off in spades when the software suddenly becomes able to do many more tasks given a capable body. Google was too impatient to keep investing in hardware until the software was ready.
I'm not sure this is a great comparison: smartphones with their cameras have, in practice, absolutely made fax machines (and most flatbed scanners) completely obsolete. People use smartphone cameras all the time to take photos of documents. I've read Apple even has an iPhone function that automatically creates PDFs out of photographed documents; there's surely other apps that do the same. By contrast, no one except dinosaurs still use fax machines.
In theory, specialized, task-specific robots in a robotics facility would be superior in performance to any kind of general-purpose robot for sorting tasks in a recycling center, and research on general-purpose robots can be applied to improving specialized robots. But there is no corresponding case for fax machines; they're truly dead and obsolete.
I find it incredibly bizarre that the Google Brain folks are just now publishing EDR work.
I mean, I understand that writing and editing a paper for publishing is work, but this had been going on for a while at EDR, so: wow, does this not inspire confidence in Google's AI project pipeline.
Perhaps it's just One Last Hurrah from the people involved.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613214/everyday-robots-...
This works at scale. Here's a 90 ton per hour recycling facility.[3]
This is the difference between feel-good recycling and industrial scale recycling.
I think this is like you read some university press release about some research into a weird graph theory algorithm and explained that social networks have been available for decades and their approach isn’t relevant there.
The waste sorting systems are interesting.
The big insight seems to be that you need some robots, but most of the job can be done by simple machines that use gravity, air jets, screens, and magnets. The robots just pull out stuff that wasn't properly sorted by brute-force means. The robotics enthusiasts wanted to do everything with robots, which is not cost effective, and the heavy-machinery people tried to adapt techniques from ore mining to recycling. It turns out that a combination of those approaches, plus the air-jet optical sorter technology used for fruit and vegetable sorting, can do the whole job in a cost-effective way.
This is what production engineering is all about.
Those industrial robots don't drive around an office building with people around. They can't be repurposed to solve other problems. These Google robots have already been doing other tasks around the MTV campus (for demonstration and research purposes, not yet practically useful).
And no, little robots driving around google's campus is not going to change the world - it's a fun novelty.
We need more of the sorting machines linked above. Everything into a single bin, and let the processing plant determine what best to do with it. Not everything that goes into a recycle bin actually gets recycled, etc. Let the pros handle it.
Recycling/Composting needs to be 100% transparent to your average person for it to actually work.
A system where humans split garbage from recycling, and then potential split recycling into e.g. corrugated cardboard, glass and everything else can work just fine.
How do I know this? It's the system we have where I live, and as far as I can tell, it works better than most others.
Contamination remains an issue, but that's likely to be even more true if humans do no separation at all.
If it's done perfectly every single time - sure. But these are humans we're discussing...
It's silly to even have to think about if something can be recycled or not. Gotta look for that recycle number on the package first - ah, this seemingly regular plastic bottle cannot be recycled after all! Pizza box with a small amount of oil stain? Nope, can't recycle that either.
Sorting machines are clearly the only reliable way to manage waste. Everything else is a distraction meant to make you feel good about doing your part, even though the reality is you probably did some of it wrong and half of the stuff won't be recycled anyway.
Fine, throw anything remotely potentially recyclable together (and have it post-sorted), but not cooking fat, diapers, dog shit, and more.
Look at how every country's COVID strategy depended on cooperative, altruistic, collective action from ordinary people. This strategy failed everywhere it was tried.
Humans are fallible, and make mistakes. Humans also have more important things to worry about than what can or cannot be recycled (the reality shocks most people).
It must be automated if it is important enough to do at all. It has nothing to do with cooperation, altruism, collective action or whatever.
And also like you said, most things are not commercially viable to recycle, so a lot of things people put in blue bins ends up in landfills anyway.
Humans should only be used for a very rough split of garbage - e.g. separate yard waste from other trash, and that's it.
I wonder if if would be more economical to have robots to pre-sort locally, before it enters the stream? Because if I had a big bucket o' refuse that a local robot would then check the /5\ codes or whatever and sort locally, it would have up to 6 days to do that and thus wouldn't have any hard realtime requirements
Failure scenarios are always present, as is keeping the poor thing clean, but it could still end up being more economical IF the streams really are a source of value, and not -- as I am increasingly starting to believe -- just a sham by the plastics industry to make one think recycling exists
At one point they were handing out T-shirts saying 9 out of 10 PHDs
Really, the point of this demo is not to suggest Google could make a product. It’s to suggest if you keep applying to Google and get accepted on you 3rd / last try, then you will be invited to work on chat app infrastructure for 2 years while other dudes at the company are doing this depicted robot thing and you get to watch. Then after 2 years you might be invited to transfer to their team to clean up their chat app back-end. It’s all about recruiting, see?
[1] https://andgein.ru/blog/all/20-i-worked-at-google-for-10-day...
Instead of writing 100s of comments on HN, you could have done something that would have paid you money and used it to feed 100s of starving kids.
The #1 problem with recycling is that the cost to manufacture something like an aluminium can is about 5 cents. Recycling it has to be cheaper, otherwise it's a net harm to the environment. For example, if you spend just 10c on energy trucking the waste to a facility, sorting it, remelting it, and making a new can from the molten aluminium, then you've caused 5c more pollution than it would have required to just make a new one!
These energy balance equations are brutal. It's crazy difficult to recycle most packaging materials like plastics or aluminium cans cheaply enough to be beneficial. Currently, it's only truly worth it for more expensive metals like copper and steel, especially if they come in a bulk form. That's why you regularly see headlines like "90% of recycling goes into landfill".
And good luck getting re elected if such a policy has a noticeable impact on people's lives.
Socialise losses, privatise profits is unfortunately the current norm.
This is so different you might as well say mobility was a solved problem because we had horses.
Most of the early pneumatic sorters had the cameras 30-??ms farther up the conveyor belt from the sorting equipment, and the signals would arrive just exactly as the piece being surveyed was about to fall off the end of the conveyor. Of course items can only be deposited on the conveyor in the first place at a rate the processing system can handle, and I guess that's one of the difficult parts.
Last time this came up it was watching a documentary on aluminum recycling. They needed to sort aluminum scrap by alloy type. It seems that there are lead alloys of aluminum out there (!?), and x-ray permittivity is how you tell those apart. Any scrap can go to making more lead alloys but you'll get into serious trouble if you make recycled aluminum window frames or soda cans with lead in them.
Prairie Robotics (and similar) is another interesting take on the problem at the industrial scale. They are recognizing contamination as the waste is collected so the generators (houses/businesses) can be notified and educated.
It's also a clear nod to Connell's Herbert, from nearly 40 years ago. A seminal project in AI/robotics history.
https://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1986c-herbert-th...
We were lucky that GPUs developed for other purposes were perfect for neural nets, and then Nvidia went all-in early on hardware to enable the rise of deep learning. But I don't think robotics will be the same. Unfortunately you're not going to magically find a perfect robot body that someone else already made for another purpose. If you want to make real progress in robotics you'll need to advance the state of the art in hardware by a lot and make something much more capable than this robot. If you're not doing that, you'll be passed by someone who does.
I've read this many times over the years, but my intuition tells me that if this was true, no single batch of trash would ever be usable. All the data we have is that people are terrible at following instructions, much less when there's no way to be caught doing the wrong thing, yet I'm supposed to believe that all the 100 neighbours that share trash with me are all doing the right thing and not compromising trash loads?
This sounds to me like not using phones in airplanes, if it were actually a problem they'd take them away from you.
Where I think we really need something like this is for outdoor uses and picking up litter. Mobility is more of a challenge but getting something to wander up and down the edges of highways picking up trash would be great.
additionally small damages caused by fraud may be far outweighed by the benefits. The question would be what ultimately pay for the fraud, the shop or some other entity.
Barcode scanning: When consumers return bottles to a collection point, the barcode on the bottle is scanned to ensure that it matches the barcodes registered in the system. If a bottle is not registered, it will not be accepted for the deposit refund. Random checks: To prevent fraud and ensure compliance with the system, random checks are carried out at collection points to verify that the bottles being returned are genuine and have been purchased within Germany.
If you see an orange vested church group
Am I missing something or is this incredibly tone deaf?
Edit: Looks like I was wrong. My interactions were only with a few folks on the research side which may not be representative of the entire EDR team.
Yep, you are.
A small percentage of the EDR team (and mainly contractors) were absorbed by Google Research - the vast majority of the team was let go.
R@G: "K we're taking over. We can hire, like, 5 of you"
EDR people: "lol ok good luck with that, bye!"
Companies seem to get a perverse joy out of laying off the team that built a product and keeping the salesteam. So they're out there selling new copies of a tool that's a few CERT advisories away from being DOA.
I don't understand how that rationalization works. Some sort of interpretation of Fake It Til You Make It? But there is a lot of it out there.
In Japan, we have a rule and schedule for litter [1]. It's a bit difficult at the begin but after a month you will get used to it and see no problem at all.
[1] https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/living-in-tokyo/tokyo-gener...
1. a glass bottle left in the field pollute much less than a plastic one
2. recycling a glass bottle has less environmental impact vs plastic
But most of all I'm mad at the very well planned green-washing that made us think that somebody do recycle plastics in significant figures.
I do know that in Italy, when a town burn plastic to produce energy, those figures end up in statistics as "recycled plastic": yes, they do recycle, no doubt, from plastic to electricity, but almost nobody are aware that recycling means burning the plastic just outside town.
Take the beautiful Aegean see in Greece: many Islands have their "little secret", a hidden bay far away from tourist eyes, and just by the sea, where they have a landfill where they just burn everything: once every 3/4 days they add some petrol and just start the fire. Ask tourists, which carefully separate garbage with no need of robots, the following:
"why do you choose plastic and not glass?"
and they all answer:
"because plastic is recycled, isn't?"
In a Greek bay landfill I would prefer tons of glass bottles vs left over of plastic bottles.
For one thing, when someone puts ie a custard contaminated paper plate in recycling, the custard can contaminate other paper recyclables. Too late to fix.
Just do it right the first time. Give it to a robot to sort.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6794799...
I don't know if the CDC does anything more with that info than reorder supplies and deny 2-week vacations for employees.