The latest robotic sorting system has been designed to imitate human touch. It has managed to attain an accuracy as high as 98.85% on the identification of a vast array of household waste items. Such technological development might increase the effectiveness of recycling plants and allow persons with hand disabilities to practice certain activities.
These sorting robots are already deployed in over 40 of the US’s 600 recycling centers and are not only twice as fast as humans, but more precise in item classification either. A team from Tsinghua University, Beijing showed that tactile sensing combined with logical reasoning raised the ability of the robot to recognize and sort objects out, including unknown ones.
The Role of Thermal Sensation in Robotics
While modern robots are brilliant at recognizing objects in a visual sense, senses enabled by advanced sensing and machine learning bring a new dimension to handling objects by feel, whether thermal conductivity or surface roughness. However, difficulties arise with objects of the same size and shape or of an unknown system.
Building on these challenges, Tsinghua University’s Professor Rong Zhu, together with his research team, has now come out with a new robotic tactile sensing method that was mimicked from human thermal sensation. This sensing method creates a layered sensor structure with surface material detection, pressure sensitivity at the bottom, and a thermally sensitive layer in the middle. The sense of grasping now feels more like real life since such a sensor would have added capabilities of thermal conductivity, diffusivity, and temperature sensing.
In a paper detailing their work in Applied Physics Reviews, the team reported that their system was able to correctly sort everything from plastic bottles and paper cartons to food scraps and hazardous materials—a wide span of common waste items. The accuracy in this classification reached 98.85%, illustrating how well such an approach could perform with a vast array of waste materials.
Looking to the future, Professor Zhu expects further developments in the line of integration of this tactile sensor technology with brain-computer interface systems. In such a real-world application, this integration could turn back on the feeling of touch for people with disabilities in their hands by rendering tactile information into neural signals understandable to the human brain.
Pets and Robotic Cleaner
The Litter-Robot is an outstanding creation for convenience in maintaining a pet, where a clean litter box enlarges to self-maintenance with no scooping involved. The contraption incorporates advanced features in pursuit of increasing practicality and hygiene. It includes an odor control system that works very well, where clumps are encapsulated into a sealed drawer, significantly reducing nasty odors in the home environment. Designed with multi-cat households in mind, the Litter-Robot will easily hold up to four cats without needing the hassle of numerous litter boxes or excessive waste.
Beyond the core cleaning feature, the Litter-Robot comes with SmartScale technology, which affords pet owners increased monitoring capabilities for weight shi — body mass index changes, and bathroom habits. In this way, it allows for proactive care of one’s pet. Moreover, every purchase of this Best Friends Bundle directly benefits cat adoptions at Best Friends Animal Lifesaving Center, thus aligning an offering with a meaningful cause in animal welfare.
It finally epitomizes how the development of such an advanced robotic sorting system that brings along tactile sensing is not only increasing recycling efficiency but also acting as a forerunner to depict interaction potential between tactile sensing technology in both robots and health applications.
