The hackers over at [HTX Studio] built a set of twenty trash cans which can automatically catch and remove rubbish.

In order to catch trash a bin needs to do two things: detect where trash will land; and then get there, fast. The second part is easy: three big motors with wheels under the bin. But how does a bin know where the trash will land? It uses a camera installed in the bin itself for that.

[HTX Studio] iteratively trained a model to process visual information from the camera to identify common types of trash. When it sees a trained object flying through the air it rushes to catch it where it will land. After many rounds of fine-tuning it finally started to work reliably.

Once the basic function was working they had some fun creating various specialized variants. One to mop the floor; one to play rock-paper-scissors with you, sort of; and one with an automatic lid, which can be used to “talk trash”. After these three came the ultimate bin: The Punishment Bin, which can fire soft darts.

In addition to the twenty bins themselves they made a recharge station with six bays containing magnetic contact points for recharging the batteries, and a heat-seal mega bin which can empty the smaller bins and put new garbage bags into them. They added LED lighting into the floor of the studio which is used to direct the small bins to the mega bin to be emptied automatically at night time when the office lights go out.

If you’re thinking you’ve seen something like this before, we covered something similar back in 2012.

Thanks to [Jack] for sending this one in.