Sorry for seeing nails everywhere as a robotics engineer but wouldn't it be awesome to have human-driven garbage trucks driving down 5th, 6th, 7th avenue while smaller https://www.nuro.ai/ sized autonomous vans go up and down the perpendicular streets picking up trash every day.
You increase frequency of trash pick up 5x at the same staff levels. Rats be damned.
Also seems like a constrained enough environment that you wouldn't get mired in autonomous driving corner case hell. It would be small bike sized vehicles driving in bike lanes.
I feel like the further I dig into automating anything, the more I find fucking everything has a huge margin for error and narrowing those margins is like a lifetime of engineering in itself.
Mind you I’m not an engineer at all, I just play one on the weekend. But really, some seemingly trivial stuff can become really complicated in a hurry. I can see automated trash pickup accidentally disposing of kids or something on the first day.
Like you though, I love the idea. I’m just more discouraged by my own incompetence.
Oh, picking-up trash is certainly one of those things that will take people-centuries to solve once somebody decides to solve it.
There are people-centuries of work applied to picking-up some much more controlled items on fabrics and warehouses. And the problem is just barely solved enough for the machines to be useful.
yeah no offense but I think robots aren't the right solution here. Roosevelt island has a pneumatic system that sucks garbage through underground tubes. It's not foolproof, but it's probably a lot simpler and more efficient than a fleet of robots
You increase frequency of trash pick up 5x at the same staff levels. Rats be damned.
Also seems like a constrained enough environment that you wouldn't get mired in autonomous driving corner case hell. It would be small bike sized vehicles driving in bike lanes.