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Anyone reading this who works/runs a robotics company, I really want to encourage you to build a robot to pick up trash on city sidewalks as an early product.
by baron816 11d ago
Anyone reading this who works/runs a robotics company, I really want to encourage you to build a robot to pick up trash on city sidewalks as an early product.
Picking up trash requires a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it’s a simpler problem than many household tasks and it’s probably on par for what these tests show is doable.
I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. If you have robots out in cities providing a public good, not only do they serve as walking advertisements for your company, you’re going to earn some trust before you’re ready deploy them into private spaces.
Plus, governments (or perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities) can be good early customers since you can have a focused sales strategy. Politicians love these types of visible quality of life improvement projects. If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a low cost, many cities are going to want to buy them.
- appplication 11d agoIt’s an outstanding idea.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- winrid 11d ago"your child has been recycled. Here's why that matters."
- yoz-y 11d agoThe cost would need to be much cheaper than the PSA then. At a buck per picked up cigarette butt, you could pay a person to do this much faster and more reliably. Heck… I’d do it at that rate.
- qup 11d agoA buck per? You could just buy cartons of cigarettes and chop off the butts, at that rate.
- arcanemachiner 11d ago"Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome."
- andwur 11d agoAnd for the illogical conclusion: buy factory equipment to make just the butts to minimise your running costs and limit supply chain dependency. I joke, but this is surely what would eventuate.
- ElFitz 11d agoThere was a line in Discworld about some people in Ankh Morpork taking to breeding rats to collect the rat catching fee.
- plastic3169 11d ago> There was a line in Discworld about some people in Ankh Morpork taking to breeding rats to collect the rat catching fee. That is maybe based on Hanoi rat massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
- ElFitz 10d agoAnd there I was, honestly thinking Terry Pratchett had come up with it all on his own. Thanks!
- vjvjvjvjghv 11d agoSame for recycling. A robot that could sort through trash would be phenomenal. You need computer vision, maybe other sensors and also dexterity. After visiting a recycling facility I think nobody should have to work there. It’s just horrible.
- whiplash451 11d agoThere’s quite a few companies in that field already. Keen to hear their feedback if they are reading this.
- eru 11d agoBurning trash works fairly well.
- Gigachad 11d agoAs a tech demo sure. But the current tech for this is much better where you just have a camera pointing at the trash falling, and either flipper paddles or air jets to push the trash in to the correct buckets as it’s falling.
- kolinko 11d agoWhy do we then still need to sort the trash? Honest question
- Gigachad 11d agoSo the truck can take stuff direct to landfill or composting. And so rotting food doesn’t destroy the recycling. Recycling then has to be sorted further.
- LoganDark 11d agoThis requires separating each piece of trash, which runs into the dexterity and computer vision issue again.
- tclancy 11d agoI feel like robots that could do this with 100% accuracy might shine too bright a light on how well recycling currently works. And I say that as a proponent of the three Rs.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 11d ago> If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a * low cost * The idea sounds good, but I'm curious about the "low cost" part. How do you account for vandalism and theft? A sidewalk robot seems like an easy target for being damaged, stripped for parts, or simply stolen.
- camel_gopher 11d agoIn SF they would be taken quickly by the homeless for parts, probably the batteries most of all. That and rummaged through for drugs, or repurposed to deliver drugs.
- ramathornn 11d agoSurely the robot will have the beta crime fighting package installed.
- swingboy 11d agoPay a little extra for the M134 Minigun attachment and you’re good to go.
- jurgenburgen 11d agoHaving expensive high tech robots picking up litter while there is an ongoing social crisis like homelessness sounds pretty dystopian.
- phist_mcgee 11d agoHave you seen San Francisco right now?
- spockz 11d agoI haven’t been to the city in 12 years. What is it like right now?
- anonym00se1 11d agoThis is a great idea!
- weird-eye-issue 11d ago> perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities I doubt wealthy HOA communities have much random trash to pick up in the first place
- baron816 11d agoThey don’t because they hire people to pick it up
- weird-eye-issue 11d agoHmm never seen that in a residential neighborhood, is that a thing? Typically there is not a trash problem simply because the residents are careful enough. Trash doesn't just appear out of nowhere
- johnnyanmac 11d agoLandscapers tend to suck up trash while gathering leaves and such. So it's not as obvious as a dedicated trash pick up crew. But yes, it does also help that a richer community correlates with more care about littering to begin with.
- techterrier 11d agoTechno optimism, meet tragedy of the commons.
- eru 11d agoThe cleaning robot might still be a good test bed. But I suspect if you are only in it for efficiency, you would use something like a street sweeper truck. Just like the dishwashing robot that everyone uses at home (the humble 'dishwasher') doesn't use robot arms to mimic how humans wash dishes. Btw, Singapore shows that we already have proven, low cost techniques for keeping cities clean without robots.
- deadbabe 11d agoOn some level, you must also be into humanoid robots for the cool factor. There is no reason to ever have a humanoid, except to make humans feel warm and fuzzy.
- eru 11d agoI wouldn't be so categorical. There might be some applications, or combination of applications for which a humanoid form factor would be useful. It's just that for most applications, more specialised forms are better suited.
- msdz 11d agoExactly. Existing paths, entryways, factories, etc. are human-sized and -shaped (or car, or other vehicle). Only once you build greenfield, e.g. new factories, making specially shaped and sized robots for automation jobs becomes worth considering, IMO.
- zhoujianfu 11d agoI’ve had exactly the same idea! Living in LA I sometime imagine how the city will look like in hopefully ten years or less when robots pick up all the litter! Hopefully there will also be landscaping robots and sidewalk/road repair bots too.. those three pretty much are what you need to turn any rundown neighborhood into a sparkling oasis it seems. My other near term idea is just robotic city trash cans, that slowly crawl down the sidewalks on a loop and empty themselves into a big bin in the alley or whatever as part of that loop. I think people probably wouldn’t mess too much with the litter bots either, especially if they work a lot on the sides of freeways. Also people don’t seem to mess too much with the cocos out there delivering food three blocks..
- dbspin 11d ago> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.
- jdcasale 5d agoI've been thinking a lot about what it would look like to support verifiable/auditable guarantees around data exfil/capture for this class of use. I don't think it's enough to pinky-promise that you aren't sending a dragnet of video with facial capture etc back to the mothership, I think you really end up wanting auditable proof that nothing sensitive can leave the robot or at the very least a no-logging hot-path inference loop (e.g. apple's confidential compute).
- fxtentacle 11d agoAlso, didn't Roomba already leak non-consensual bathroom videos?
- LoganDark 11d agoIt is absolutely a PR problem. Privacy is a real concern, but it's the PR that companies are scared of. As, say, Flock have been starting to find out lately. Public backlash matters. And PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too. For instance, people started avoiding Ring cameras once it got out that they're a privacy nightmare -- that's PR. Sure, the people that avoid them care about privacy -- that's why they're listening -- but PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to. Likewise, PR is how people get creeped out by robots scanning their homes. They already never wanted that, of course, but they weren't creeped out until they learned about it. That's PR. Now people are wary to let any new devices into their homes, especially robots, because of historical PR like this. And so now it is a PR problem to get people to give you a chance in the first place. Edit: I want to be explicit here that I'm saying you avoid bad PR by not only being good but having people discover the good. And waiting for people to sufficiently discover it can be a struggle. It doesn't matter how good you are if people don't know. That's what I mean by it being a PR problem -- PR is how people know.
- rubicon33 11d ago+1 if they can also scoop the human feces and power wash the sidewalks in SF.
- fxtentacle 11d agoI would like to run a robotics company. But raising for that is super challenging, because you have high execution risk combined with low margins on the final product. It's like the opposite of what western VCs want to see. That's why this type of company is usually founded in China. And I disagree with you. I'm pretty sure parents worldwide would love a clean-up robot. You can avoid a lot of the risks by making it work only for empty rooms, which is OK because you need to clean up and let the vacuum robot run anyway (when the kids are away sleeping in their bedroom). There's been multiple attempts at building DYI robots to vacuum LEGO bricks off the floor. (Because stepping on them at night is such an immediate pain point.) Unless your product is soaked in hostile behavior and surveillance tech, parents will probably be happy to buy an in-home cleaning robot, no PR needed. I think the main issue here is that parents are typically busy, which makes them bad startup founders, which is why they cannot "scratch their itch" and turn it into a business. => home cleaning robots do not exist because western VCs don't like it and parents aren't usually startup founders.
- serbuvlad 11d agoPlaces that have lots of trash around will vandalize an unsupervised robot. Places that will leave alone an unsupervised robot don't have lots of trash around. Entirely disjoint sets.
- dotancohen 11d agoHow are the two correlated?
- spwa4 11d agoPeople want streets cleaned. Not only will people not pay for that, they'll steal from anyone who tries to clean the streets.
- bko 11d ago[dead]
- IshKebab 11d agoLocal wealth & social class. Also population density.
- dotancohen 11d agoAre you suggesting that wealthy people litter less? Are you suggesting that wealthy people can not be vandals? Or are you suggesting that common people are littering vandals?
- IshKebab 11d ago> Are you suggesting that wealthy people litter less? Yes. Well, middle class less than working class at least. And only on average. Also individual behaviour isn't the only factor - they also tend to live in wealthier less dense areas, where councils have more money to spend on keeping things tidy, and there are also people who do volunteer litter picking. > Are you suggesting that wealthy people can not be vandals? Obviously not. > Or are you suggesting that common people are littering vandals? Not even sure what you're trying to say here. You think I was suggesting that all lower class people are littering vandals? Lol.
- micromacrofoot 11d agoyeah but how do you contend with me beating the shit out of it
- saejox 11d agoi agree with good pr and common good. however, challenges: articulated robots are expensive (many would steal them) dust and water resistance with moving parts
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- alightsoul 11d agoI have never seen trash on a sidewalk. I have seen them in bus stops though
- j_kao 10d agoWould be curious if this ends up incentivizing more littering.
- bunger 10d agoThis is really stupid tho. There are already robots that are way better at cleaning the streets. This is at least how they clean the dirty af streets in eindhoven after an event literally in one single night. Maybe sorting the trash for recycling... But then you don't need any legs, at most hands. So I don't think humanoid robot would be the way but there would still be the need of vision and hands I guess...