We Built an Auto-aiming Trash Can

To save everyone the hassle of taking out the trash we built 20 running trash bins Our studio is a mess There’s always garbage on the tables on the floor and the bins are always full At first I thought the problem was simply not enough trash cans So I bought more But for some reason people still didn’t bother Then I had a thought: What if the train bin catches trash mid-air and then empties itself automatically ? Wouldn’t that solve everything ? To catch trash there are two points First know where the trash will land Second, get there fast The second part’s easier we added three big motors and wheels under the bin so it can move quickly Nice move But how does it know where the trash is ? Twelve years ago someone online made something similar He used a Kinect on the wall to detect trash But that only works in a fixed zone So instead we put the camera on the bin so it can go anywhere it wants Then we trained a model to identify common types of trash When it sees a trained object flying through the air it sprints to intercept After many rounds of fine-tuning by our engineers it finally caught its first piece of trash