The future of recycling is here. Of course, it involves robots and artificial intelligence.
Rebecca Hu, co-founder of the robotics company Glacier, creates robots that help recycling plants separate, or recycle, materials.
Previously, separating recyclable materials was a manual process that took hours for someone to do. Currently, Glacier is using his AI camera to help robots better identify recyclable materials. Hu said training a robot to find materials is similar to teaching a young child how to distinguish between two things. “If you give them an example of 100, 1,000, 1 million aluminum cans, they get pretty good at pattern matching,” she told Found.
The robots are also trained on what not to pick up. Here, Mr. Hu tells me that those thin plastic shopping bags can't actually be recycled. “It contaminates everything,” she said, adding that robots are trained to pull it out and send it back to the landfill. This gave rise to the concept of “wish cycling.” This is the process by which someone throws something away without knowing exactly whether to put it in the trash or the recycling bin. Hu said these aspirational cyclists actually do more harm than good, and if someone is unsure about an item, it's better to just throw it in the trash.
And finally, the moment we've all been waiting for has arrived. Hu also said that the robot does have a name. But you'll have to listen to the episode to find out which famous songstresses some of the robots' names are taken from. Enjoy the episode!