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.
