一個能自動幫你垃圾分類的機器人

At an office in San Francisco, if you drop a coffee cup in a robotic waste bin, the machine will automatically sort the cup for recycling.

在舊金山的一間辦公室里，如果你把咖啡杯扔進機器人垃圾箱里，它就會自動把杯子分到可回收垃圾里。

The office is one of the first to use the technology, called TrashBot, from a startup called CleanRobotics that is trying to solve a fundamental challenge in recycling: Even when someone is diligently trying to reduce waste, there’s a good chance they’re recycling wrong.

這間辦公室是第一批使用TrashBot(智能垃圾分類機器人)技術(shù)的，它是初創(chuàng)公司CleanRobotics的產(chǎn)品，旨在解決回收中最基本的問題：即使一個人想盡量減少浪費，但他們也很有可能回收錯。

“The idea was really born out of frustration,” says Charles Yhap, cofounder and CEO of CleanRobotics, which is a semifinalist in the current IBM Watson AI XPRIZE.

CleanRobotics公司進入了本屆IBM沃森人工智能XPRIZE競賽的半決賽，聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人兼首席執(zhí)行官Charles Yhap說：“這個想法真的是無奈之舉。”

He points to the example of a store like Whole Foods, where anyone who eats at the salad bar then has to figure out which bin to use for their fork and box and cup.

他以Whole Foods(一家美國超市)這樣的商家為例，在那里的沙拉吧就餐的人需要弄清楚他們的叉子、盒子和杯子要扔進哪個垃圾箱。

“I’ll eat my food and I go to throw something away and I’m confronted with an array of waste bins, and it’s just so confusing—everywhere you go, the rules are slightly different, and I’m still not sure that I’m doing it correctly.”

“我吃完東西去扔垃圾時，面前有一排垃圾箱，我就懵了。你去的所有地方分類規(guī)則都會有差異，我都不確定我扔得對不對。”

He thought that technology could help. “We started looking at the diminishing costs of sensors and robotic components and the increasing accessibility of algorithms and AI systems and we thought, maybe we can build something that does this better than people,” he says.

他認為這項技術(shù)會有所幫助。他說：“我們先是發(fā)現(xiàn)傳感器和機器人部件成本下降，算法和人工智能系統(tǒng)的可達性提高，所以我們認為可以做出在垃圾分類方面比人類做得好的產(chǎn)品。”

It helped that current bins are already expensive—a single set in an airport might cost $1,200. “These are just shiny metal tubes that don’t do anything for you. So we thought we could build a robot that is price competitive and adds a ton more value.”

對我們有利的是現(xiàn)在垃圾桶都很貴，飛機場的一套垃圾桶就要1,200美元。“那些只是有光澤的金屬桶，什么都做不了。所以我們想我們能做出一個機器人，價位合適，而且用處很大。”