Orange Planet

I was talking to a friend about waste baskets lately, because we were at Costco and they stocked this strange kind of garbage can which would open when you bring your hand near it. And now there’s this type of garbage can that responds to human speech (or a robot’s mechanical sound wave for all I know). But I want something that’s a sliver different. I want to be able to throw things at the garbage can (near the mouth, of course), and the can should open its mouth when the trash is near it. If my aim is terrible, it should calculate it before hand and move accordingly.

For example: I’m sitting at my desk, and the garbage can is about 5 meters southwest of me. I want to swivel my chair, toss the paper that I crumpled up into a neat bowl at the can, and it should gobble it up. Of course, I can have one that is open and has no lid, but that’s no fun. Ideally there would be a sensor that keeps track of the infrared changes nearby, and when there’s something that’s not too big in terms of the IR waves that it exudes, it’ll conclude that it is indeed waste and get ready to gobble it up. It might sense that it’s coming at a certain velocity, and calculate the angle, from which it can use Newton’s Laws of Projectile Motion to actually estimate where it’s going to fall, and move accordingly.

If such a can does become a reality, my room will almost always be clean. Maybe. It depends on how efficiently it can calculate where the trash is going to fall. If it’s good at it, my room’s going to be really clean. If not, then it’s just going to have redistributed trash. And I’ll kick the can.

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