How many times have you thrown something at your waste basket only to miss completely or have your bit of trash rebound off the rim? What if your waste basket was smart and could meet your trash halfway? What if it could see and catch your garbage?
That would be, in a word, awesome.
In this video someone tosses a blue ball halfway between their book shelf and their waste basket. By the time the ball gets there the waste basket will have moved into position to catch the ball perfectly.
“Apparently it’ll do the same for just about anything you throw. We’re unable to read the captions but it looks like this may have been made as part of a commercial which is shown in the first few seconds of the video after the break. From there we see the development of a locomotive mechanism which will fit into the bottom of the bin. It start as a single swivel wheel, but gets more complicated quite quickly. Once the low-profile three-wheeler is milled and assembled it’s time to start writing the code to translate input from a Kinect 3D camera and extrapolate the position for catching the trash. The final result seems to do this perfectly.”