Hacker News Reader

Comment by mozak1111 | Hacker News Reader

I see this and I immediately think of "trash sorting" at ultra high speed. If one can combine this with a bunch of accurate (laser precision) air guns, to shoot and move individual pieces of trash you can sort through a truck load of trash in a matter of seconds, perhaps in the air while they are being dumped! compare this approach with how we are currently doing it [0] - Somebody should get Elon Musk on this project right away!

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbKA9uNgzYQ

View on HN

Sorting by optical recognition and air guns to separate a falling curtain of product into two output streams is already a product. The development of these machines are the reason that 10 or 15 years ago you stopped seeing bad beans in bulk bean bags. I am involved in the tea industry where they are used to sort tea by grade - stems, bad leaves, broken leaves, full leaves.

Here is a diagram: https://www.satake-usa.com/what-is-optical-sorting.html

Yes but when I went to the recycling (sorting) facility in San Mateo they remarked that their plastic sorting systems work by infrared reflection and so cannot see black plastic. They said that because of this they are unable to process black plastic entirely. I got the sense that there’s room for improvement.

Bonus slow motion footage of their processing machines: https://imgur.com/gallery/IK5zKkO

Reminds me of the library modernization drive in 'Rainbows End'. The book digitizer is basically a wood chipper with lights and high speed cameras in the debris chute.

There was a company in Japan that would digitize your books and destroy the original (to prevent infringement claims), iirc.

Not related to Elon but there is a company called Pellenc ST in the south of France that work exactly on this kind of problem. You can see a video of one of their machines here [0].

I work at an AI consultancy [1] that help them use deep neural nets in these high throughput and low latency conditions. It's an interesting challenge and the performance than can be squeezed from modern hardware are indeed impressive.

0: https://youtu.be/XLciSGE82DY?t=280

1: https://neovision.fr

This is a thing already. In my understanding, it's a staple in several kinds of recycling processes. Random sample of related links (there's a seemingly infinite amount of these though):

https://youtu.be/mLya2NuY4Yk

https://youtu.be/GJeOfHxMWQo?t=87

https://youtu.be/bWUuBz2hWc0?t=83

Trash sorting is probably better than self driving cars. I only see speed talk on this page and nothing about accuracy.

Musk needs like 99.9999% accuracy at near zero latency over several hours of operation. I think Tesla currently is at maybe 99.995% from driving my car. The last 0.005% results in phantom braking etc. It's actually a very hard nut to crack and I don't expect them to achieve the full self driving in all conditions for another 10-15 years maybe. The edge cases are just too many.

I like the trash idea though (or a Q/A robot at a factory etc).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com