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Introduction

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Hello world! Meet Sawyer. They help sort recycling! Sawyer uses its smarts to scan for objects and then make a determination of what to do next. In this case Sawyer looks at the object in front of them and determines if it can be recycled or not. It does this by using pre trained images. In our demo Sawyer looks for recycling labels, like the one below.

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If that image is not found but Sawyer detects that something is there than it will throw it in the trash. This works by using a simple IF statement. For example, if the label is present then throw in recycling. ELSE throw it in the trash.

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Sawyer uses an air compressor to generate air for the gripper to grab onto objects and uses an on board camera to sense objects. For Sawyer to drop something the object needs to be identified and the arm needs to be in the proper place before the air is turned off.

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A Real-World Application

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When programming this application I imagined that Sawyer would be on the line at a recycling facility ensuring that each thing that goes by has a label. Now this has it problems, what if there is no label but it is recyclable? To solve this what if we could use artificial intelligence (AI) to learn what and what is not recyclable? Then Sawyer would be able to analyze each object really quickly as it passes the line only removing things that are recyclable. This application would not only help save our recycling but it would speed up the process. In a perfect world you would have multiple Sawyers on the line making sure everything is good to go.

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Wrapping Up

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The reason that I built this was because so much of our recycling is not actually being recycled. If we could harness the power of AI and robotics then I believe that we would be in a better more sustainable place.

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Programming with Sawyer is always interesting to me as there is just so many things that you could possible do with it, the options are truly limitless. The struggle of this project was figuring out how to get the gripper to pick objects up and tell it when to drop the object. As you need to \"close\" and \"open\" the valve to shut of the air and that isn't very intuitive in the programming software. But overall it was super cool to build this!

","frontmatter":{"date":"February 25, 2021","path":"/sawyer","title":"Building a Recycling Sorter With Sawyer","thumbnail":"/assets/IMG_1767.jpg","metaDescription":null}}},"pageContext":{}}}