Laser to detect plastic/alloy materials

[lazeristasUVISIR]

I see done it in a very complicated way LOL

Recognize something what is not a natural thing (a garbage) by image processes acquired by satellites. Then send a helicopter with a powerful laser to shoot and do a breakdown spectroscopy. Figure out that it was a degradable paper, recall back all ready-to-fly cleaning drones. Have a nap

In my town a garbage is vacuumed by machines operated by humans. Looks efficient to me. In spring time volunteers (kids) go to parks to collect garbage too.

 

[paul1598419]

I see done it in a very complicated way LOL

Recognize something what is not a natural thing (a garbage) by image processes acquired by satellites. Then send a helicopter with a powerful laser to shoot and do a breakdown spectroscopy. Figure out that it was a degradable paper, recall back all ready-to-fly cleaning drones. Have a nap

In my town a garbage is vacuumed by machines operated by humans. Looks efficient to me. In spring time volunteers (kids) go to parks to collect garbage too.

:crackup: Hilarious!

 

[Benm]

Well yeah, you could make it all seem extremely absurd.

Then again littering is a real world problem, and having some automated system that cleans a place up would be valuable to have.

And as far as that goes using drones to do so may not be that bad away to go about it, especially in somewhat remote locations where collection by humans is difficult and/or expensive.

I think the approach should be the other way around though:

- use the drone to identify objects that were not there a day ago (fully automatic)
- take photos of these objects and select which ones are actually trash (partly automatic)
- use the drone to remove it if deemed to be trash

I think the middle step would be the most challenging really: you cannot go around picking up every item that was not there yesterday (or last week). In natural situations you have the issue that you get 'wanted' stuff like newly sprouted plants, indegenious animals that move and many other non-stationary things that are just fine.

Perhaps you could AI to achieve this to some degree: first let humans evaluate every object as trash or not, and when you have a large dataset train an AI to recognize it. This technology is still developing though: AI's have become better recently and now can tell if a picture is of a dog or of a cat (super simple for a human, but not for AI).