Autonomous Trash Sorting

• Daniel Thomas
• Angeline Kampert
• Parth Patel
• Melad Sweis

“Garbage in recycling is messing up the industry.” – Will Campbell, The Spokesman Review, 2018 “You might be doing it wrong.” -Helen Thompson, Smithsonian Magazine, 2014 “China closes door to recycling.” – Ivan Couronne, Science X, 2018 “Plastic bags are not supposed to go in recycling.” – Ivan Couronne, Science X, 2018 “US struggles to keep plastic from the dump.” – Noreen O’Donnell, NBC Universal, 2018 Trash is something every human usually encounters throughout his or her life span. To efficiently utilize our resources, we tend to recycle some of the garbage we throw away. Recycling is a process that is manually done currently and relying on human intuition and motivation to do so is sometimes unreliable. This report outlines a proposed trash method of autonomous trash sorting that allows the trashcan to decide whether the item thrown away belongs in recyclables or not. The decision making is done using a vision system that analyzes pictures taken of the object using python programming packages. Identifying the object visually coupled with the mechanical processes of sorting object to where it should be disposed. In our example the items are disposed in three smaller receptacles within a shell, which appears as one trash can, by the motion of a cart to a designated receptacle’s specific location. The design of the can is innovative, and the disposal criteria is based on conventional recycling criteria.